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Chapter Text

“The last favor I’ll ever ask of you,” is how Lucifer frames it. His brother has “fallen on hard times” and needs to get out of Los Angeles for reasons he neglects to specify, and he wonders if she could give him some kind of job at her club. 

Given all that Lucifer has done for her, and the fresh troubles that still dog her, Candy has no choice but to agree.

Candy doesn’t exactly expect an identical twin, but she assumed she’d find at least some hint of similarity between Lucifer and his brother. Despite their identical size and face, though, the figure that descends the steps of the Megabus and comes to a stop on the baking concrete sidewalk in front of her is utterly unfamiliar. He’s wearing the most god-awfully ugly turtleneck and blazer she’s ever seen, and must be sweltering in the desert heat. His shoulders cant asymmetrically, and he has a cruel diagonal scar across his face to match. But the biggest difference between this man and his charming, amiable twin is the twisted expression on his face, like he’s tasting something unpleasant as he takes in the landscape.

The other passengers disperse or pair off with the friends or family welcoming them, eventually leaving the two of them standing in the afternoon sun.

“So you’re Lucifer’s stripper ex-wife,” he drawls in a flat American accent, giving her an unimpressed once-over. 

“So you’re his deadbeat brother,” Candy retorts, putting her hands on her hips and mirroring his disdain.

“You must really owe him if you’re willing to fetch for him on command. Or maybe you’re desperate for another favor in return.”

He leers at her, eyes raking threateningly down her body, but she simply straightens her posture and raises an eyebrow. He’s not the first man to try to make her feel afraid with his eyes and an oblique threat of sexual violence, and he won’t be the last. She long ago claimed her body and her sexuality as her own—tools of her trade just as much as her singing voice or her ability to put on a cutesy bimbo act. 

She doesn’t blink at his close guess, regardless, her poker face well-polished after a lifetime in the business. “And you must have truly fucked up if he ran you out of the entire state of California.” She extends her hand. “Candy Fletcher.”

He stares at her hand for a moment but doesn’t offer his own. “Michael.”

“Morningstar?”

He shoots her a look like she’s just said something completely idiotic. “No.”

They walk in silence to the parking lot. She opens the trunk of her Kia for him to deposit his lone, battered suitcase and then watches with no small amount of amusement as he crams himself into the front passenger seat. He fumbles, searching for the seat adjustment for several long moments before she takes pity on him and reaches down between his legs to jerk on the handle. He slides backwards abruptly with a startled noise and she suppresses a bark of laughter.

“You can drop me off wherever,” he says suddenly, after she’s pulled out into traffic.

“What?”

“You don’t need to do whatever it is that Lucifer coerced you into doing. I’m not gonna be the one to tell him you didn’t, anyway.”

“I see. So what’s your plan once I drop you off on a random street corner in Vegas?”

Michael shrugs and stares sullenly out the window at the flat, brown expanse of desert outside. They pass the airport, and his head tilts upward to watch a plane coming in for a landing above them.

“Winning big at the slot machines? Busking as a living statue on the Strip? Male prostitution?” Candy prompts.

He snorts. She notices his fingers tapping anxiously against his knee.

“Listen, there’s a couch in the dressing room at my club you can crash on, just for tonight, if you want. It’d make me feel more like I kept my promise to Lucifer, so you’d be doing me a favor. Tomorrow, if you feel the need to seek your fortune elsewhere, you can go right ahead.”

He turns his head slightly to regard her out of the corner of his eye, and she feels a little like she’s coaxing a feral cat out from under a porch. Try not to make any sudden movements; look as unthreatening as possible. She glances away from the road for a moment to give him her biggest, bubbliest smile. His mouth twitches into a grimace and he looks away from her abruptly, eyes flicking back and forth at the scenery around them.

“Fine,” he bites out after a long moment.

“Great,” Candy says, feeling like she’s done her due diligence. He gives her a sense of unease she can’t quite shake, and she’s not sure about the prospect of keeping her promise to give him a job if he decides to stay. She doesn’t think Lucifer would ask her to do anything she couldn’t handle, but she has the feeling that his brother is still going to be more trouble than she needs in her life.

Fletcher’s is only a half hour from opening when they finally make it through the traffic and park in the alley behind the club. Michael trails her inside like a tall shadow as Candy flings her purse into the back office and hurries down the hallway that leads to the club proper. The waitresses are in the process of taking the chairs down from on top of the tables, and her new bartender, Natalie, and the barback are busy slicing limes and lemons.

Since the unfortunate incident with her old bartender and the struggle for ownership of the club, she’d decided to rebrand a bit and settled on the gimmick of being the only all-woman owned and staffed nightclub in Vegas. In a city already so driven by sex, however, the appeal hadn’t been as great as she’d hoped.

She directs Michael to a seat at the end of the bar. “I have to get ready for the show, so I’ll leave you here for now. Drinks are on the house.” She and Natalie exchange a meaningful glance. Candy trusts the woman knows how to keep a man at a manageable, non-disruptive level of inebriation for hours if necessary. “Anything else I can get you?”

Michael slumps onto the barstool like, well, like someone who’s been on a Megabus for six hours. “I think I can manage.” He turns his back to her to face the bar, and Candy hears him mutter, “Gin, neat.”

Candy manages to forget about her inconvenient guest for a while as she’s swept up in the chaos of putting on the night’s show. She meets briefly with her stage manager to go over the set list, stops in the dressing room to make sure all the dancers made it in on time, and then hustles over to her tiny corner to do her hair and makeup and get dressed. Distantly, she hears the M.C. warming up the early crowd, and soon after, the dancers hustle out for their first number.

When the time for Candy’s first song arrives, she takes a deep breath, stares at her reflection for five heartbeats, and lets her stage persona settle over her like a well-worn sweater. Candy the hard-nosed and practical small business owner is replaced by Candy the bombshell sexpot, a complete airhead to anyone who’d take the trouble to find out. The perfect disguise.

She swans out onto the stage to mild applause of a Thursday night crowd, beams at the audience, and then as her accompanist plays the first few chords, breaks into song. 

I'm feeling mighty lonesome
I haven't slept a wink
I walk the floor and watch the door
And in between I drink
Black coffee
Love's a hand me down brew
I'll never see a Sunday
In this weekday room

Candy has always loved the power performance gives her. She can command people’s attention, manipulate their emotions—prompt laughter, lovesick sighs, lustful stares, or even tears if she really lays it on thick. If she were being particularly honest with herself, she’d admit that it’s this, not her father’s legacy, that makes it so hard for her to part with the club. She could sing somewhere else, sure, but nowhere else would lend her this kind of complete control over who she gets to be and how she gets to be seen.

She reaches the second verse and steps down off the stage and onto the floor, as is her custom, pausing to interact with patrons here and there as she weaves between the tables. At the end of the bar, a shadow catches her eye, and she remembers that she left Michael there. She’s struck again by what a stark contrast there is between him and his brother. When she first caught sight of Lucifer at her bar, years ago, he attracted almost as much attention as she did, and she was wearing a sequined dress and standing under a spotlight. Even as a drunken wreck, he drew your eye. His very presence tempted you to come closer, to talk to him, to tell him your secrets.

Although the bar is fairly crowded, no one has chosen to take the seat next to Michael, on the other hand. He hunches in the shadows and fairly radiates “fuck off” energy. And while Candy could tell from the cut and quality of Lucifer’s suit that he obviously had a pocket worth picking, she has the distinct impression that if she turned out Michael’s pockets, moths might fly out.

Candy wanders towards him on a whim. Small business owner Candice Fletcher might find him unnerving and unpleasant, but Candy the Lounge Singer fears no man, especially not in her domain. She can barely make out his eyes tracking her in the glare of the spotlight. She sidles closer to him as she eases into the bridge of the song, hips swaying, her hands tracing up her thighs, hips, and waist over the tight material of her gown, leaning close to let her breath ghost across his cheek as he leans away from her, alarmed, one hand gripping his drink for dear life. She walks two fingers up his chest and then tilts his face towards her with an index finger under his stubbled chin. He stares at her, eyes wide and lips slightly parted, as she sings.

Now a man is born to go a lovin'
A woman's born to weep and fret
To stay at home and tend her oven
And drown her past regrets
In coffee and cigarettes

She steps past him and lets her fingers trail lingeringly across his shoulders as she moves on to lavish attention on a septuagenarian enjoying a shrimp cocktail at table fifteen.

Candy returns to the stage just in time to end the song, and can feel one particular pair of dark eyes burning into her as she accepts her applause and sashays offstage, exulting in the high of adrenaline and adulation she chases every night she performs.

She sings a handful more songs as the night progresses, each time working a different section of the crowd as the character of the audience gets looser and drunker, and eventually emptier as night turns into the small hours of the morning. At two AM, the doors close and the club quiets, populated only by a busboy mopping and placing chairs once again atop the tables. Candy changes back into her casual clothes, leaving her makeup to wash off once she gets home. She heads back out into the club and pauses at the register, where Natalie is counting cash.

The bartender jerks her head towards where Michael is still sitting at the end of the bar and whispers, “Eighteen shots of gin, and not so much as a slur. The guy’s a machine.”

Candy raises her eyebrows, impressed, and says her goodnights, wandering further down the bar to sit next to Michael. He doesn’t seem at all intoxicated, but he does seem significantly more relaxed than when he first arrived.

“Enjoy the show?” she asks, standing up on the footrest of the stool to snag a bottle and a glass from behind the bar.

He shrugs indifferently. “Music is more my brother’s thing.”

“Okay. Well, how about the dancing?” She pours herself a drink.

“There didn’t seem to be much skill involved. Basically just an excuse to flash their crotches at the perverts in the front row.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

“Then I don’t get it.”

She chuckles and he gives her an odd sidelong look, the corner of his mouth tugging up in an uneven smile. “So are you gonna tell me your story or what? Why did Lucifer drop you into my lap? Do I have to worry about trouble following you here?”

Michael pins her with his unnerving gaze. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No, not really.”

“Typical.” He sighs heavily and stares down at his drink for a beat, face taking on a melancholy expression. “Well, the first thing you need to know is that my brother has hated me for our entire lives. He left home a long time ago, and I stayed to work for the family business, to pick up the slack that he dropped. And when he saw I was poised to take over when our dad retired, well, it sent him into a rage. He conspired behind my back with our siblings and forced me out because he couldn’t stand seeing me succeed. He took everything I had and sent me here.”

Candy manages to keep a straight face for a second before she cracks, snorting in laughter. “I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to do a lot better than that. I’ve done the ‘O, woe is me!’ act way too many times to fall for it. Try again, and maybe the truth this time.”

Michael scowls at her. “Fine. I attempted...well, let’s call it a power grab. In our family. And it didn’t go as planned. Took a big gamble and lost it all.” He downs the rest of his gin in one gulp, mouth twisting bitterly. “Lucifer won. Again. And, as he says, he was ‘magnanimous’ enough to ‘permit’ me to stay on Ear—in the country.”

“As if he’s in charge of that, right?”

“Unfortunately he is, now,” Michael mutters. Candy wonders just how exactly her mysterious ex-husband made his fortune, anyway. 

The details may be opaque to her, but Candy can see the broad strokes of the story laid out as clear as day. Brother turning against brother is a tale as old as Cain and Abel, after all. The grim, choleric brother in his shabby brown blazer who could never hope to hold a candle to his brilliant, charming, stylish, successful twin. Always overlooked, always underestimated. A family business and a struggle over succession, exacerbated by a lifetime of resentment. A final confrontation, but no real resolution to be found on anyone’s part. For Michael, though, this isn’t just a bump in the road. This is defeat, complete and humiliating.

“That sucks,” she says bluntly. 

Michael turns and gives her a wild grin that contains as much anger as humor. “You know what? It really fucking does!”

Candy pours a finger of vodka into his empty glass and raises her own in a toast. “To families, and all the bullshit they put us through.”

As Michael raises his glass to hers, she sees the tiniest flicker of something like respect in his eyes.

Candy shows him the restroom and the sofa in the dressing room that’s nowhere near long enough to accommodate him, and then heads home for the night, locking the club and its unlikely occupant inside.

She has to run a few errands the next day and doesn’t make it to work until mid-afternoon, half-expecting, maybe half-hoping to find Michael already gone. 

When she walks in, though, the first thing she hears is an unusual amount of excited chatter in the dressing room. She pokes her head in to see the dancers in their typical various states of undress, most looking like they just arrived.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, thank god, Candy!” Maria, the de facto queen bee of the group grabs her melodramatically by the shoulders. “There was a creepy homeless guy sleeping in the dressing room when Kaylee and I came in! Look, he left his gross jacket.” She gestures to where Michael’s tweed blazer is slung over the arm of the couch.

“He said you knew he was here, but we kicked him out,” Kaylee adds. “He sort of reminded me of that guy who sang here a couple years ago...”

“I thought he was kind of cute,” Nina, who’s about as smart as Candy pretends to be, pipes in.

“Skeezy perverts can be cute, but it doesn’t make them not skeezy perverts.”

“He had a nice body!”

Candy sighs, rubbing her brow. “Sorry I forgot to tell everybody一 he’s...my friend’s brother, and I was doing him a favor letting him crash here.”

This pronouncement is met with even more general excited chatter. She fields questions until she manages to slip back out the door and into the club proper. He’s nowhere to be found inside the club, but when she pokes her head out the front door, she spots his hunched form sitting on a bench down the street, eyes fixed balefully on the cloudless desert sky.

“Sorry about that,” she says, approaching him. His gaze flicks to her, eyes cold.

“You didn’t think to tell any of your employees I would be there?” he snaps.

She crosses her arms defensively, ire rising to meet his. “I didn’t exactly get a ton of warning before Lucifer dumped you here, okay? And I have other things to worry about. Besides, why were you still asleep at two in the afternoon?”

He deflates, planting his elbows on his knees and scrubbing his face. “I’m just...tired.”

Candy regards him thoughtfully. He wanted to strike out on his own when she picked him up yesterday, and he’d had plenty of time to do so, but he’s still here. Maybe she can keep her promise to Lucifer, after all.

“Do you want a job?” She blurts.

He looks up at her quizzically, a hint of a smirk playing around his lips. “I’m not sure my high kick is up to snuff.”

Candy laughs despite herself. “No, I think we’ve got that covered. But we’ve had to have our hostess double as a doorman, and we don’t have a bouncer, which has caused its share of problems in the past. So if you could man the door, collect the cover charge, and throw out anyone who makes trouble, that’d be a two birds/one stone kinda thing for me.”

He stares at her, head cocked to the side in a way that gives him a vaguely reptilian aspect, for so long that she starts to fidget.

“I mean, I can’t pay a lot, but probably enough to get you somewhere to stay until you get back on your feet. And it’s not, you know, interesting work, but you get to meet a lot of people and一”

“Yes,” Michael interrupts her rambling. 

“Yes?”

“I’ll take the job.”

“Oh. Okay.” She blinks. For some reason, she’d been sure he would say no.

“When do I start?”

Michael gets a wooden stool, a cash bag, and a too-large sport coat with the Fletcher’s logo embroidered on the breast, and is given a post just inside the entrance to the club. It’s not a hard job. He collects the ten dollar admittance fee and glares at anyone who asks him to make change until they avert their eyes and silently continue past him to the hostess stand.

He’s not sure why he agreed to do this. Maybe it’s just nice to have a job to do again. He was always a good worker. Sure, sometimes he found some unorthodox means of completing tasks, a means that typically involved manipulating some of his slower-witted siblings into doing the work for him, but the job got done, and that’s all that really mattered.

And besides, what else was there for him to do? Lucifer had excised his wings as if he were a disobedient cockatiel. He had nothing to his name but his wits and a change of clothes. This ugly, gaudy desert city was as good a place to land as any on this awful, human-infested, dying planet.

He watches Candy Fletcher as she engages in some light banter with patrons between songs, drifting gracefully from table to table, radiant in the light of the spotlight, a light that glows in the blonde curls of her hair and sparkles on the glittering length of her very, very tight dress. There were worse views than this, he thinks.

Candy turns to make her way back to the stage when a meaty hand darts out and grips her rear. 

“Honk, honk!” a middle-aged man with several empty pint glasses on the table in front of them laughs obnoxiously. The man releases her ass and lunges forward clumsily, attempting to grab her around the waist. Candy darts out of his grasp, giggling and moving back towards the stage with poise. Her eyes flick towards Michael pointedly, but he’s already on his feet, stalking rapidly across the room as Candy breaks into song.

The man burps, face creasing in disappointment, turning to his equally inebriated friend to say something. Neither of them notice Michael at all until he’s lifting both of them by the backs of their jackets and carrying them bodily out the door.

“The fuck?” The man’s friend cries. “Put me down, asshole!”

“Sure thing,” Michael replies easily, tossing him from the door of the club out to the gutter, where he lands inches away from evening traffic before scrambling backwards onto the safety of the sidewalk with a yelp.

Michael sets his handsy friend onto his feet but doesn’t release his grip on the man’s coat. He stares up into Michael’s face, taking several long moments to get his eyes to focus.

“Whazz goin’ on?” he slurs.

“You’re about to be touched by an angel,” Michael says brightly. The man has a moment to stare dumbly at him before Michael knees him in the balls and flings him away to join his friend, groaning in pain, on the curb.

Michael dusts off his hands, admiring his work for a moment before striding back into Fletcher’s. The job might not be half-bad, after all.

After the club closes for the night, Michael does a quick count of the cash he collected, arranging it into a tidy stack ordered by denomination, and heads to the back office to give it to Candy.

He pauses in the hallway outside when he hears voices in the office. The door has been left ajar, and he leans casually against the wall outside to listen.

“—was nice seeing you again,” Candy is saying.

“Yeah. Yeah, really nice. I just wanted to drop off these. You left them at my apartment a few months ago, and I kept forgetting to give them back,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice replies.

“Oh, great! I was wondering where they went.”

Michael peeks through the crack in the door to see a woman with short, brown hair and wearing a black leather jacket drop a pair of earrings into Candy’s hand.

“So you’re moving, huh? Where to?” Candy asks, tucking her hair behind one ear and perching on the edge of her desk.

“Austin. I know, so passé these days, right? But I’ve got a really great job lined up.”

“I’m happy for you,” Candy says—unconvincingly, to his ears.

“Thanks.”

There’s a pregnant silence. 

“Well, I’d better be going. Big drive tomorrow,” the brunette says. Candy tilts her face up, and the woman seems unable to resist ducking her head down and kissing her lingeringly.

Candy sighs when they part. “Bye, Allie.”

The woman gives her a tight smile, hefting a motorcycle helmet. “Bye, Candy.”

Michael steps back swiftly and silently as the woman walks out of the office and turns towards the back exit. He hovers for a few seconds, considering this scene and trying to identify the latest cause of the surge of bitterness he’s feeling, before he raps on the office door.

He hears a sharp inhalation, footsteps, and then Candy flings the door open. Her face falls immediately when she sees him. The bitterness intensifies.

“Came to give you the take from tonight,” Michael says. He blinks innocently. “I saw a woman leave just now. I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything.”

“No, nothing,” Candy says quickly, taking the stack of cash from him and riffling it. She does a poor job at concealing the disappointment on her face, or maybe she’s not even trying. “Very...orderly. Thanks.”

“$2440,” he reports. 

“Wow, that’s...significantly more than I’d expect for a crowd that size.” She peers at him suspiciously.

Michael shrugs. “Some people were feeling particularly generous.”

Candy snorts. “Sure they were.” She counts out $200 and hands it to him. “Don’t ask me for a W-2 next year, okay?”

Michael tucks the bills into his breast pocket. “I make no promises.”

“That should be enough for a bus pass and a couple nights at a motel until you can find somewhere more permanent.”

Michael nods, turning to leave.

“Hey, Michael,” she says as he’s halfway out the door. He pauses.

“Thanks for handling those two assholes tonight.” She gives him a small, genuine smile, nothing like the megawatt grin she wears onstage. He feels the bitterness recede like a wave falling away from the shore.

“It was nothing,” he says after a speechless moment, ducking his head awkwardly.

“Goodnight, Michael.”

“Goodnight, Ms. Fletcher.”

He walks out the door feeling like he’s standing a little taller, for once.

Michael wakes in discomfort, a blade of sunlight stabbing into his eye from a chink in the motel blinds. The lumpy bed, sputtering air conditioner, and dreams of Candy and the statuesque brunette in leather, twining and writhing together on a pink satin bed, conspired to leave him sweaty and throbbing both in his bad shoulder and between his legs. 

Again. 

It’s been two weeks since he arrived in Las Vegas, and in the absence of anything even remotely mentally engaging to occupy him, his subconscious has instead decided to torment him with thoughts of his employer. And her predilection for women. Just his luck that the only human woman since Chloe Decker whom he’s found remotely bearable is not interested in his particular set of equipment. Humans are so superficial.

He stumbles into the grimy motel bathroom and turns the water as cold as it will go, thinking about Lucifer’s smug face and pretentious accent, about a wickedly sharp blade carving across his face, and the searing pain of a flaming sword severing the wings from his back until his erection recedes.

After toweling off and combing his hair, he dresses and heads to the little greasy spoon across the street, where he eats rubbery eggs, drinks burnt coffee, and reads whatever cast-off newspaper sections he can scrounge from nearby tables.

His regular waitress, Darlene, glares at him, arms crossed, as he counts out exact change for the cost of his meal and leaves it on his table.

“You know, we live on tips,” she says loudly as he walks past her.

“If you want to be paid a decent wage, you should get a better job, Darlene.”

She flips him the bird and he smirks in reply, whistling tunelessly as he walks four blocks to the bus stop. It’s a ninety-minute ride with two transfers to get from his motel to the Strip, during which he stares idly at the urban sprawl passing outside, coming up with improbable revenge scenarios and contemplating his bleak, endless future.

The late morning through afternoon he spends wandering from casino to casino. Occasionally he stops and plays enough Blackjack to make some pocket change, but not enough to attract attention. It’s a ridiculously easy game, as long as you keep track of what cards have come out already. But apparently that simple practice is frowned upon.

Vegas is a playground of desire, but also one of fear. The two do, incidentally, often walk hand in hand. For every person basking in a big win, there are dozens terrified that the next roll of the dice or turn of the card will lose them a car, a house, a marriage. He talks to these unfortunate souls in hotel lobbies and bars and buffet lines, drawing out their deepest fears and the secrets that so often come with them.

To what end, he’s not sure. Maybe it’s out of habit. Maybe it’s just who he is. But he’s unearthed his share of secrets about Vegas’ dark underbelly over the weeks, and that kind of knowledge can always come in handy.

When the sun gets low in the cloudless sky, he heads to Fletcher’s. The back of the club is already abuzz with the staff preparing for the night. He tries to make it past the dressing room silently, but to no avail.

“Michael!” a voice squeals. It’s Nina, or maybe Tina, one of two sisters and former teenage beauty queens from Arkansas who are not so much identical as just so generic-looking in their heavy makeup and costume as to be indistinguishable. Nina/Tina grabs him by the arm and drags him into the dressing room, where several of the girls are casually half-way into their costumes, chatting with each other.

He swallows and averts his eyes from the numerous shapely breasts on display, feeling his face heat.

“You have to settle an argument for us,” Nina/Tina says, batting her lashes flirtatiously. She’s still holding his arm, but has begun to stroke his bicep.

“About what?”

“Kaylee thinks your accent is Maryland but I think it’s New Jersey. Who’s right?”

“Neither of you,” Michael says shortly, pulling his arm out of her grasp. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Aww, you’re not gonna tell us?” Nina/Tina whines.

“No.” He backtracks out of the room as rapidly as he can and heads down the hallway. Distantly, he hears one of the girls say, “I hate talking to his face, but I love watching him walk away.”

He opens the door into the club proper and finds Candy talking with Natalie at the bar. He does a slight double take when he notices her dress tonight. It’s short, very short. The fabric itself ends just a few inches below her hips, but a long beaded fringe hangs past that, almost to her knee. Whenever she moves, it reveals tantalizing glimpses of creamy thigh. 

He swallows with some difficulty, directs his thoughts away from the stirring in his trousers, and takes a seat at the bar near them.

“Hey, Michael,” Natalie says neutrally. He nods in response. The two of them have established a wary respect for one other. Michael keeps creeps away from her bar, and in exchange, she keeps him well-supplied with enough liquor to get him through the night.

“Hi, Michael,” Candy says, leafing distractedly through a clipboard detailing their current liquor stock. From just glancing at it over her shoulder, he sees some problems.

“You’ll be out of Jack Daniels before the end of the week,” he comments.

She turns to give him a perplexed stare. “How can you tell that?”

He shrugs. “I pay attention. And I’m good with numbers.”

She shakes her head. “Well I’m fucking not. Natalie, can you order some more?”

Natalie nods and walks away towards the phone.

“I should have you do my accounting,” Candy says with a grin, gathering up the papers in front of her.

“Sounds fun.”

“Either you’re joking or you’re more of a sicko than I thought.”

The night is fairly routine. It’s a Friday, so it’s a bit busier than usual. Michael manages the queue of customers, more than the club has capacity for. He scrutinizes people who claim to have reservations for long enough that most of the liars balk and leave. It’s just past ten when a dark-haired man in casual clothes bypasses the line and steps up to Michael directly.

“Back of the line,” Michael says flatly.

“I’m a friend of the owner’s,” the man says in a noticeable New York accent. “Donny Ricci.”

“Oh, are you on the list?” Michael asks.

“Sure.”

“There is no list. Back of the line.”

“Listen, buddy. I dunno if you’re new here, but Donny Ricci don’t fuckin’ wait in lines in this town, capisce?” The man grabs Michael by the lapel and attempts to pull him off balance. Michael smirks and clasps Ricci’s wrist, squeezing until he can feel the bones grind together and the man releases his jacket with a whimper.

“You listen, buddy. Either you wait in line, or you don’t get in, capisce?” He releases the man’s wrist.

Ricci stumbles back, cradling his arm. “Your boss is fucking dead, you hear me? And you are too, Quasimodo! Fucking shithead.” He stalks off down the street, and Michael gestures for the middle-aged tourist couple who are next in line, gaping at him, to step forward.

He forgets about the impudent Donny Ricci as the rest of the night passes, letting himself get lost in the blur of humans and the sweet sound of Candy singing while her thighs peek through the fringe of her dress to torment him.

After the club closes, Candy pulls Michael aside. He looks at her in apparent surprise. And she’d have to be blind to notice that recently, he’s really been looking at her.

“Did anyone show up today who seemed to be of the, you know, Italian mob variety?” she asks anxiously.

“Yeah, actually. Some twerp named Donny Ricci?”

“Did he...say anything? Natalie says he never came to the bar.”

“Oh, that’s because I didn’t let him in.”

“You—you what?” Her jaw drops open. Oh man, she was so, so fucked.

“He was an asshole,” Michael says defensively.

Candy rubs her brow in distress. “Well, it’s not like I could have paid him,” she mutters.

Michael takes a not-very-wild guess. “You’re in some kind of financial hot water?”

She laughs. “That’s one word for it.”

“Show me your books,” Michael says, in a resigned tone that is belied by the spark of excitement in his eyes. She leads him into the back office and he sits down at her tiny desk, the ancient rolling desk chair creaking in tired protest under his weight, and directs his attention to the dusty beige CRT computer monitor.

Candy slides her father’s old ledger off the bookshelf and lets it fall to the desk with a hefty slam. He stares at it in apparent astonishment.

“I may not be what you’d call tech-savvy, but I’m fairly certain human accounting technology has progressed past pen and paper,” he remarks, locating the ribbon marking the most recent page and flipping the heavy tome open.

She plops down on top of a stout black filing cabinet, tugging the hem of her stage costume down primly. “Well, my dad used it, and when I inherited the business, I had to account for all his finances. I keep meaning to digitize it, but…” She trails off. Michael’s not paying attention anymore, his attention riveted to the tiny rows populated by her haphazard scrawl. Despite the boyish locks of hair hanging down from his forehead, she gets the distinct impression of an elderly miser—kind of like Ebenezer Scrooge in the made-for-TV version of A Christmas Carol she and her dad used to watch every year—as his finger methodically tracks down the rows.

He’s silent except for a few tuts and hums for several minutes, until eventually he stops and cocks his head. He leans back and indicates a row with his index finger. “In the interest rate column for this $50,000 loan from May ninth...what is that? A smiley face?”

She leans over his shoulder to look at it. He sucks in the slightest breath as her breast presses into his shoulder, so quiet she wouldn’t notice if she weren’t inches away from his face.

“Oh, no, that’s a skull,” she clarifies.

“Do I wanna know what a skull for an interest rate means?”

“That it’s a loan from the mafia, so if I don’t pay it back, I’m dead.”

“It’s three months overdue.”

“Yep,” she sighs.

He opens his mouth to say something, but apparently thinks better of it and snaps it shut, huffing in frustration.

“Spit it out.”

Michael grits his teeth. “Why not just ask my brother for help? I’m sure he owes you for...taking me on.”

Candy looks down at her silver platform heels where they dangle against the filing cabinet drawer. “I can’t keep relying on him to bail me out,” she replies. “It’s humiliating. I figure...he set me up to succeed here, and if I can’t even make that work…”

She risks a glance back up at him, expecting his typical exasperation or contempt, but instead she finds something like understanding. He nods shortly and turns back to the ledger. “Well, do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“Good news, please.”

“There’s probably enough fat to trim here that we could make the club break even. Your liquor supplier is gouging you on prices, for example, and I’d bet a bunch of your expenses are tax-deductible.”

“And the bad news is I’m already in too deep with my creditors for it to make a difference?”

“Via financial methods alone, at least.”

This might be it, she thinks. She blew her last chance. She swallows tears that threaten to rise. If she lets that start, there will be no stopping it, and she really doesn’t want to do that in front of Michael. She takes several calming breaths and looks up to find him staring at her fixedly.

“Let me handle it,” he blurts.

“How?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She regards him for a long time, long enough that he hunches further and his eyes shift away uncomfortably. He’s clearly got experience with a family that handles shady shit, if Lucifer is now in charge of it. He’s stronger than he looks. Like, freakishly so. And despite her better instincts, she’s surprised to find that she actually trusts him, at least a little. At least she trusts that he’s comfortable where he is now and probably wouldn’t stab her in the back. And what else does she have to lose?

“If you get me killed, I will come back from the dead and kill you.”

He fails to suppress a smirk. “Noted.”

“Then have at it.”

Chapter Text

Michael sits placidly on a folding metal chair in a back room at the Viper Club, hands bound behind him, surrounded by cold-blooded killers. Above his head, a single bare lightbulb swings gently in the breeze of the air conditioner.

“Loving the whole mob execution vibe here,” he remarks.

“You’re awfully calm for a man who disrespected my family.”

The crowd of mafiosos parts and an older man steps forward. His black hair is shot with gray at the temples, and a scar even more gruesome than Michael’s slashes raggedly down his left cheek. He wears a bright red track suit, unzipped halfway and revealing a white wifebeater and ample gray chest hair. There are a lot of track suits in the room, all told. Without taking his eyes off of Michael, he holds his hand out to another mobster to his right, and the other man draws a handgun from his shoulder holster and passes it to him.

“And you are…?” Michael inquires with a smirk.

The man scoffs in disbelief, looking at the other men around him. “Can you believe this guy? I’m gettin’ ready to blow his fuckin’ brains out, and he’s got the balls to keep acting like a disrespectful little prick.”

The mobsters all chuckle obligingly for a few moments. “Shut the fuck up!” the man screams. There is immediate silence.

“Since clearly you’re too fucking stupid to know, my name is Michael-fucking-Ricci, dipshit.”

“Oh, always nice to meet a namesake,” Michael replies. “I assume you’re related in some way to little Donny Ricci?”

“He’s my nephew. And he hasn’t been able to so much as pick up a fork since you fucked up his wrist.”

“Well, he seemed like maybe he’d been eating a little too much pasta anyway. Consider this a diet plan.”

Ricci lunges forward, grabbing a fistful of Michael’s turtleneck and pressing the barrel of the gun to his temple. “You wanna die, asshole? Not only did you hurt my nephew—your dumb bitch of a boss owes me fucking fifty grand plus interest. Maybe sending her your head in a box will convince her that I’m serious about getting what I’m owed.”

Michael’s expression darkens. “That ‘dumb bitch’ is ten times smarter than you, you bloated sack of human shit.”

Ricci bares his teeth, face purpling with rage. He steps back and aims the gun point-blank at Michael’s forehead. “Any last words, asshole?”

“Yes, in fact,” Michael replies, black eyes boring into the mob boss’s. “I wonder if you’d tell me...what is it you fear, Michael Ricci?”

Ricci’s face goes slack, and then slowly twists in a grimace of terror. “I’m...I’m afraid that my men will realize I’ve been ratting them out to the FBI.”

Michael’s eyebrows rise in surprise. “Wow, what an unfortunate thing to say in front of them.”

The other mobsters look at each other dumbly for a moment, aghast, until almost as one, they draw their guns and turn towards their boss. “I knew it,” hisses the man who’d been standing to Ricci’s right. “You cocksucker.”

Ricci shrinks back, paling, his eyes darting between the men surrounding him. “N-no, I’m not a rat! He tricked me! It was some kind of hypnosis! Please—“ He raises his gun and brandishes it wildly at the other men, edging backwards. “Get the fuck back,Vinny! Get away from me! Go fu—”

He stumbles back into the door, and fires a wildly-aimed shot that ricochets off the ceiling. Michael’s view of him is briefly concealed as the other men close around him. There is a struggle, and then another single, deafening shot that rings in the small room for several seconds. 

By the time the mobsters turn back to him, Michael has snapped the zip-tie holding his hands behind him and is straightening his rumpled shirt. He peers past the group at the corpse of Michael Ricci, slumped against the door below a spatter of blood, a neat hole in the center of his forehead. 

Michael hisses sympathetically, wincing. “You know, I knew it was something bad, but oof, talk about a justified fear.”

Vinny—now apparently the leader of the group—eyes him, his stare cold and calculating, spatters of his ex-boss’s blood visible on his blue velour tracksuit. “Sorry, pal, but we don’t leave witnesses.” He raises a handgun and fires a shot at Michael. 

Michael’s head snaps back from the impact, then he sits forward with a hiss of pain. “Okay, first of all, ow,” he deadpans, raising a hand to rub the fading pink welt the bullet left on his forehead.

Vinny’s eyes widen, and the arm holding the gun wavers and falls. The other men step back with gasps. One crosses himself and whispers, “God have mercy.”

Michael’s expression sours. “You’re wasting your breath,” he snaps.

Vinny raises his gun again, arm trembling. “What the fuck? What are you?” 

Michael stands, looming over the shorter men, and spreads his arms. Behind his head, the lone hanging bulb’s light lends him a cold halo, casting his face into shadow. He smiles.

“What I am...is the one who’s in charge now.”

“Oh, hey, you’re back,” Candy says anxiously, looking up from the stack of paychecks she is pretending to work on as Michael walks down the hall past her office, a plastic shopping bag hanging from his arm. She puts the thoroughly chewed cap on her pen. “How did it go?”

“Oh, fine, after some haggling with Mr. Iyer.”

Candy stares at him, nonplused. “Who’s Mr. Iyer?”

Michael scoffs. “The grocer down the street.” At her confused silence, he elaborates. “Natalie said we were low on limes and asked me to pick some up.”

Candy gets to her feet, grabs him by the arm, pulls him into the office, and slams the door behind him. “I’m so happy you helped Natalie stock the garnishes, but I think you know exactly what I’m actually asking about,” she hisses.

Michael smirks. “Oh, that. It went fine.”

“‘Fine.’”

“Yep.”

“What does ‘fine’ entail?”

“Your debts are forgiven.”

She stares at him, head cocked skeptically. “Just like that.”

“Just like that.” He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a scrap of yellow legal pad paper, handing it to her.

On it, in rushed, sloppy handwriting is the text, “all dets past and future to Flechers club forgived,” followed by the date and a rushed signature that seems to belong to someone named Vincenzo. There are some dubious reddish-brown spots flecking the paper.

Candy looks up to find Michael staring at her with an expectant grin.

“What is this?”

“You wanted it in writing, so here you go.”

“The head of the family is Michael Ricci.”

“True. Up until very recently.”

“You killed him?” Candy asks, sotto voce, dreading the answer.

“No, his men apparently decided it was time for a regime change.”

She gapes at him for a few moments and he preens at her astonishment, chin rising proudly. Then she decides...she doesn’t want to know. All she cares about is her club surviving. If Michael had to do some unsavory or illegal things to make that happen—call on some of his family connections, she assumes—then well, Ricci and his lackeys were in the mafia in the first place. They knew what they were getting themselves into. 

“Okay. Well...thank you.” She swallows, overwhelmed. She didn’t really expect this to work. Certainly not without conditions. She’s been living under the shadow of debt and the fear that accompanies it for so long that the idea of being free of it feels...incredible. They stare at each other for a long moment, and then she abruptly stands up on her tiptoes and flings her arms around his neck, dragging him down into a hug.

“Oh,” Michael says, stiffening.

“Thank you,” Candy whispers again into the scratchy fabric of his jacket. Hunched or not, he’s remarkably solid and strong under her arms. He smells like cheap motel soap and something distinctly masculine. She is reminded suddenly of how long it’s been since she was last this close to a man. She feels one large hand come up and pat her awkwardly on the back. 

“You’re welcome.”

She releases him and steps back, and he straightens, clearing his throat. It’s hard to tell under his freckled tan, but he looks a little flushed. Perpetual sour mood or not, he’s certainly not hard on the eyes. They stare at each other for an awkward moment before Michael raises his shopping bag. “Well, I’d better—”

Candy nods effusively. “—Yeah, I’ve got to…” She gestures vaguely in the direction of the papers on her desk.

He gives her a tight-lipped smile and backs out of the office.

Candy celebrates her newfound financial freedom the next weekend by going shopping for the first time in months. She doesn’t have all that much extra wiggle room in her budget, especially since Michael overhauled it, but there must be enough for her to afford a couple new bras—to replace the ones she left at Allie’s that didn’t get returned—and a show costume or two, she reasons. They’re business expenses.

She wears her new dress for the Saturday night show—traditionally, the busiest of the week. It’s inky black velvet studded with glimmering black beads that form whorls around the low-cut sleeveless bust and the fitted, floor-length skirt. Above her right leg is a slit that runs nearly all the way up to her hip. She applies her reddest lipstick and decides, as she examines herself in the dressing room’s floor-length mirror, that she looks like an absolute bombshell. Totally worth it.

She’s greeted by cheers and wolf-whistles when she takes the stage and positions herself next to the baby grand, launching into a classic.

Summertime
And the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy's rich
And your mama’s good-lookin'
So hush, little baby
Don't you cry

She looks out over the rapt audience, a roomful of eyes all focused on her, and finds two in particular. On the far side of the room, Michael stands at the entrance to the club, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe, eyes black and unblinking. She gives him a private smile, and his lips quirk in response, before she launches into the second verse.

One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take the sky
But 'til that morning
There's nothing can harm you
With daddy and mommy standing by

The night is one of those rare ones where the energy in the club is almost palpable. She sings the rest of her set and then two encores after the dancers finish, to enthusiastic, drunken adulation. There’s the feeling of something she thinks of as the Vegas spirit in the room, that sense of freedom, of possibility, of stepping outside of the bounds of normal life. The spirit that causes people to get married on impulse at drive-through chapels, to stake their life’s savings on black or red, to take big swings and often bigger misses. It’s rare for it to infect her, a child of the city, but she thrives on it, regardless.

She’s giddy with it when the last of the audience drains away. She glides into the dressing room, thinking about a future without debt or fear. One where all of life’s possibilities are laid out before her. And she didn’t need Allie anyway. Allie, who always wanted to escape this city. The city that was everything to Candy. She’s in Austin now, drinking overpriced kombucha with a bunch of third-tier hipsters and tech bros. And good riddance. 

The dancers laugh at her ebullient good mood.

“You were so sexy tonight, Candy!” Tina fawns as she unrolls her stockings. “I love that dress!”

“Yeah, I’d fuck you,” Maria adds with a wink.

“In your dreams,” Candy retorts, grinning, as she admires herself again in the mirror. 

The dancers dress in their street clothes and filter out, leaving Candy alone in the room. She sits at her vanity, daydreaming about renovating the club, about adding new acts—magicians are making a comeback these days—when there’s the sound of someone clearing their throat behind her.

She turns to see Michael standing in the doorway, his nightly stack of cash in his hand.

“Hey,” she says, grinning up at him. He steps forward abruptly and hands her the money, an inscrutable expression on his face.

“$4650,” he says.

“I’m beginning to think you raised the cover charge without asking me,” she jokes, getting to her feet.

“You probably could. They’re getting a bargain, compared to how crappy and overpriced your competition is.”

“Be careful, Michael. I might take that as a compliment.” She steps closer to him, into his personal space, and places a hand on his chest. He looks down at her, eyes widening.

“I...may have intended it as one,” he breathes.

“Well, then. I may be inclined to thank you for it.” She tilts her face up towards him, lips parted, a clear invitation. He bends slowly downwards towards her, then pauses.

He exhales shakily, a confused expression on his face. “But you’re a lesbian,” he blurts.

Candy laughs, finding his hand and bringing it up to press it to her breast. “Oh, am I? I wasn’t aware.”

She stretches upwards and presses her mouth to his. The kiss is chaste at first. He freezes for a moment, shocked, she thinks. Then she moves her lips against his and he responds in kind, mimicking her. The hand on her breast squeezes gently, then shifts downwards to cup her, thumb stroking against the soft velvet of her dress. Candy lets the wad of cash in her hand flutter to the worn red carpet and loops both arms around his neck, pressing herself closer. In reply, his free hand grips her back, exposed by the low cut of her dress. His hand is cold and a little clammy against her skin, and she winces inwardly. Well, it’s up to her to warm him up, she decides.

She licks against his lips and then presses her tongue past them when they part. He emits a long moan that rumbles through her, the hand against her back pressing her closer. She feels a telltale hardness against her belly through his trousers.

She threads one hand through the soft black hair at the nape of his neck and lets the other trail down the muscles of his broad back to his very well-formed ass, which has been the subject of much conversation among the dancers for the few weeks he’s worked here, squeezing. He surges forward against her in surprise, his mouth breaking away from hers, panting. She trails her lips past his stubbled cheek to nibble gently along his jawline.

“Wait,” he gasps, pulling back to look at her. “Wait. You don’t actually want this.”

She huffs, frustrated. “I’m bi, Michael. We do exist.”

“No, it’s not that, it's just...you don’t want me.” His expression is half incredulous bafflement and half bitter self-recrimination. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s for me to decide.”

“I’m not my brother.”

Candy laughs breathlessly and nods. “That’s pretty obvious.” She tries to lean back in to kiss him again, but he holds her away, hands as immovable as stone.

“So it’s not gonna be like reliving the time you fucked him.”

Candy blinks at him, scoffing. “I did not fuck your brother. It would have been like having sex with a...a sad puppy.”

“Well, you’re in the minority, then,” Michael mutters. But something seems to strike him and he looks upwards into the middle distance, a sly smirk on his face. “A sad puppy, huh? Hear that?”

She turns to try to figure out what he’s looking at, but there’s nothing there that she can see. She shakes her head and looks back at him.

“Listen, tonight was a good show and I need to blow off some steam. I was having fun. Are you having fun?”

He nods warily.

“Then don’t make it into a big thing.”

She leans up to kiss him again, and this time he lets her, opening his mouth and meeting her tongue with his own. He seems hesitant, moving just a split second behind her, or maybe just out of practice. Luckily, she’s never had trouble taking the lead. She eases his jacket off and slips a hand up under his turtleneck to slide along the taut muscles of his abdomen. His hand finds the neckline of her dress and pulls it down beneath her breasts, which he admires greedily for several moments before cupping them, teasing her nipples with his thumbs until she whines and reaches for his belt.

They fall slowly to the floor in an inelegant tangle of limbs and fabric. He braces himself on his left arm while his right hand fumbles to find the slit in her dress. He finally parts the fabric and slides his hand up the length of her thigh, mouth stretching into a grin. She opens his fly and pulls him free, hot and hard in her hand. He makes a strangled noise that sends a flush of pride and excitement through her.

Candy rolls him over onto his back and straddles him, hiking her dress up and out of the way and pulling her panties to the side so she can sink down onto him. She hums in pleasure, eyes sliding shut, hips grinding back and forth against his. He breathes loudly and unevenly in the quiet of the dressing room. She opens her eyes to find him staring up at her silently, a high flush on his cheeks and his hands clawing at the carpeting and scattered cash beneath them.

She leans down and kisses him again, filthily. His hands come up to tangle in her blonde curls, trembling breaths gusting through his nose.

“I’m—” he says, voice strained. “I can’t—”

She takes his hand and guides it to where they connect, showing him how to touch her. He looks down at their joined fingers, brows contracting in concentration.

“Yeah, like that,” she gasps, once he’s figured out the rhythm she needs.

She grinds her hips slowly as her pleasure builds and builds. 

“C-Candy,” he gasps, face tensing and hips bucking upwards abruptly. She scrambles to pull off of him and manages it just in time. He spills across her brand new dress with a groan and then lies back onto the carpet, panting. Candy sits back on his thighs and works her fingers between her legs for a few more moments, admiring his flushed, unfairly handsome face and bracing her free hand on his heaving chest until she peaks, shuddering above him.

She collapses onto the carpet next to him, catching her breath, one hand still resting on the rayon blend of his turtleneck above his heart.

“I ruined your dress,” he says, after a few serene moments of post-orgasmic calm.

“It’s not ruined. I know a good dry-cleaner,” she replies through a yawn.

“Good. I liked it. Is it new?”

“Yep.”

“Was it in the budget?”

She turns her head to look at him. He’s looking at her with a mischievous half-smile. She picks a handful of cash off of the floor and shoves it into his face playfully.

“Shut up.”

Michael finds himself whistling the next morning as he showers and dresses, unable to shake an irrepressible smile that sits strangely on his face. A smile he’s not accustomed to wearing. Details of last night keep coming back to him at unexpected moments. Her face, her breasts, her mouth. The tight, wet heat of her around him. He slept better last night than he has since…well, since any night in recent memory. He hopes neither of his Earth-dwelling brothers ever finds out, because the “I-told-you-so”s about the merits of consorting with humans would be unbearable.

He simply smiles placidly at Darlene’s scowl when he orders his customary breakfast, and he hands her a five dollar bill as a tip as he strolls past her on his way out.

“Buy yourself something nice, Darlene.”

“Fuck off, asshole,” she replies, squinting at him with suspicion while she stuffs the bill into her apron pocket.

Once he steps off the bus downtown, instead of his normal midday meander around the Strip, he heads over to The Mirage and plants himself in front of a bank of old, inexplicably Spider-Man-themed penny slot machines, where he plays one cent at a time at the slowest rate at which he could really be said to be “playing” at all. He hates the little lizard-brain thrill he gets every time two or three Mary-Janes or Daily Bugles begin to line up, only to be inevitably followed by camera or spider icons. The running tally of his worldly assets in his head slowly decrementing every time he pushes the button is like nails on a chalkboard. Why was this entire city like this?

Eventually there’s a deferential tap on his shoulder. “Mister...uh...Michael?”

He turns to find a rotund man in a forest green tracksuit standing behind him, sweating bullets even in the icy air conditioning of the casino.

“You’re late,” Michael snaps, just to see him cringe and cower.

“Sorry, sir. Real sorry. Parking, you know? Vinny Tattaglia sends his respects.” He reaches into his track jacket and withdraws a thick envelope, surreptitiously passing it to Michael, eyes flitting up and around at the security cameras in the ceiling.

Unconcerned, Michael opens the envelope and thumbs the stack of hundred dollar bills inside. Content with his count, he looks up at the mobster, who’s watching him anxiously.

Michael stares at him, one eyebrow raised impatiently. “You can go,” he clarifies after a pregnant silence, and the man hurries away eagerly, casting only a single nervous glance backwards as he makes a beeline for the exit.

Michael strolls after him at a more leisurely pace, a panoply of new ideas dancing gleefully through his mind.

Michael arrives at Fletcher’s an hour before opening, settling on a barstool next to Candy while she pours over a pile of paperwork, a phone pressed to her ear.

“Evening, Candy,” he says, grinning at her knowingly.

She spares him a distracted glance. “Hey, Michael.”

“So, I was, uh, just thinking about last night.” He leans in closer to her, warm breath tickling her ear. “And I was wondering if maybe on your night off tomorrow, we could一”

“—No, that’s fourteen cases. Yeah, thanks.” Candy says abruptly into the phone. She pauses while the wholesaler on the other end of the line replies and scribbles a note on the paper in front of her. She covers the mouthpiece and turns back to Michael. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

Michael frowns, leaning back again. “Nothing.”

“Great. Could you help Natalie? She needs to switch out a keg in the basement.”

“Fine,” he mutters, standing and trudging off. 

Candy watches his sloped shoulders as he disappears around the corner and hangs up the phone, sighing. It was fun, but it’s probably a good idea to end things before they get serious. She doesn’t have the best track record, and he is an employee. Not to mention he has enough red flags to supply a socialist rally.

They don’t speak again before the show starts. Candy watches him from behind the backstage curtain while the dancers perform. He doesn’t seem...any more perturbed than he normally does. He accepts money from patrons politely, occasionally muscles out anyone too drunk or impatient or pushy to get in. No one seems to have the spine to face down Michael for long. She sees more than one alpha-male frat boy swollen with testosterone pale in terror at something Michael says. 

She’s about to turn away to get ready to go onstage when three men whom she recognizes as members of the Marconis一a New Jersey crime family currently allied with and somewhat subservient to the Riccis—approach him. Candy doesn’t owe the Marconis money currently, but she certainly has in the past, and they’re not above hitting up an unaffiliated club for protection money. She freezes, wishing she could run across the room and pull Michael aside to warn him.

The four of them talk for a few moments, and then the three men nod deferentially to Michael. The leader shakes Michael’s hand with both of his, smiling effusively and bowing over their joined hands. Candy gets the sense that the mafioso would be kissing Michael’s ring if he had one.

She gapes at the scene, baffled, and stands rooted to the spot until the stage manager jogs up to her.

“Candy, you’re on,” she hisses.

Candy shakes herself. “Yeah. Yes, just a second.”

She goes through the motions of her act in a bit of a fog, puzzling over how a penniless bouncer who’s been in town for all of three weeks could have managed to climb into the upper echelons of organized crime in Las Vegas. 

And—more importantly—what did that mean for her?

Chapter Text

Working the organized crime beat in Las Vegas was a little like being in the Sandcastle Defense Squad on a beach, as Detective Jones’ old lieutenant was wont to say. There were certain inevitabilities that you just had to accept. The mob would always be there, there would always be extortion, racketeering, and bribery. The role of law enforcement was mainly to try to keep an eye on things and be ready to intervene in situations that were particularly egregious or had the potential for civilian casualties.

After doing it for a few years, you got a sense of what was normal and what wasn’t, which kinds of events should actually prompt alarm, and which were just business as usual.

The sudden fall of Michael Ricci was a major event, but not particularly outside of the norm. She was one of the privileged few in the LVPD who was clued in to the fact that he’d been an informant for the FBI, helping them gather evidence on some bigger fish in the New York wing of the organization, and C.I.s in the mafia had an unfortunate tendency to turn up six feet under without warning.

But the strange situation surrounding his successor一that was an odd one. The first thing she hears is whispers of a new boss, someone from out of town. Someone who seems to make seasoned criminals nervous. He appears out of nowhere and suddenly sits at the head of the most powerful crime family in the city. The first images she manages to find of him are blurry security camera stills from a gas station near the Viper Club. The most she can glean is that he’s a stooped, dark-haired man. Jones’ C.I.s refuse to discuss him at all.

She catches a break a few weeks later when an officer recognizes Anthony Bertolucci, a Ricci button man, heading into The Mirage with a flop sweat and the darting eyes of someone carrying something worth stealing.

Jones calls in several favors and gets a warrant for the security footage. The Mirage’s video quality is, predictably, significantly better than that of the gas station. She switches from camera feed to camera feed as she tracks Bertolucci through the casino floor and to an out-of-the-way bank of slot machines. And there he is, seemingly unconcerned by the exposed locale 一 the stooped, dark-haired man. He has a prominent scar across his face and can’t be much older than forty. 

He accepts a fat envelope of cash from Bertolucci, smiles, and says something with a jovial slap on the mobster’s arm that makes him visibly pale.

Jones scrutinizes the video for a long time, but eventually decides that she doesn’t recognize him, so she takes several images of him from the video and runs his face through all the major law enforcement databases.

For someone involved with the mafia, she expects there to be a criminal record, maybe a warrant out for his arrest.

And she does get a hit. But she’s baffled to find that up until a little more than a month ago, the man was apparently a consultant for the Los Angeles Police Department.

She opens the record and starts learning everything she can about this ‘Lucifer Morningstar.’

His record is impressive, despite the fact that all the initial paperwork detailing his qualifications for a rare civilian consultancy position is completely and utterly bullshit. The lieutenant who authorized it has since moved on to bigger and better positions in the organization, anyway, so apparently it wasn’t a problem. He and his partner (who incidentally resigned shortly before him) had a remarkable case closure rate, comprising a significant percentage of the solved murders in Los Angeles over the past few years.

Jones calls the LAPD’s general phone line and is directed to Personnel, who can only tell her that he formally tendered his resignation five weeks ago. From there she’s redirected to Homicide, where the lieutenant can’t give her much more information, although the man breaks into what sound like genuine tears of grief at Morningstar’s departure. He forwards her call to someone named Ella Lopez, a CSI whom he describes through hiccuping sobs as “the only good one left.”

“LVPD!” Lopez exclaims in a high-pitched voice after Jones introduces herself. “I haven’t been there in years, I swear! I have proof! You can’t charge me with anything!”

“I’m, er, not trying to,” Jones reassures her. “I’m on the organized crime task force and I have a few questions about a consultant you worked with named Lucifer Morningstar.”

“Oh, Lucifer? Happy to talk about him all day! Me and him are BFFs for life. But what would he have to do with a Las Vegas organized crime task f一” Ella comes to a hard stop mid-sentence. “Oh no,” she breathes, just barely audible over the phone. “The family business.”

“Yeah, so, I just wanted to know if you’re aware of him having any connection with the Ricci family, either in their New York or Vegas branches.”

“Sorry, I gotta go! I’ve got—an Erlenmeyer flask...boiling. That I need to attend to,” Ella says abruptly. “Can I call you back later?”

The line goes dead. Jones stares at her phone in bafflement. Who was this guy?

Lucifer, the recently-appointed ruler of the universe, is lazing in bed, admiring the sight of morning light refracting in the gold of the detective’s hair as she snores beside him when his phone vibrates with a text. He reaches over to his nightstand to grab it and smiles when he sees it’s from Miss Lopez. No better way to start the day than with a video of an animal doing something abnormal or a man being struck in the testicles in a humorous manner. Certainly better than the recent, morbid habit he’s acquired of listening to prayers, which are by and large incredibly depressing.

what the heck did u get mixed up in in Vegas???

Nothing! 

And good morning to you as well

I just got a call from an LVPD asking about you

From a detective on the ORGANIZED CRIME task force

Is your “family business” the freaking mafia???

I understand if you can’t say on an unsecured line

If it’s true, send me an emoji only I would understand

Bloody Michael, he thinks. Couldn’t be left alone for a minute without getting into trouble. He sighs and rubs his brow, already feeling a headache coming on. Being God on top of being a brother, a lover, and now a reluctant step-father is certainly not all it’s cracked up to be. He’d assumed omniscience would be easy — that he’d just always be passively aware of everything happening, all the time. But either he’s just fundamentally not built with the same capacity as Dad was, or it’s something that takes a lot of practice to master. Every time he tries to just let the knowledge wash over him, he is overwhelmed by it. It’s like trying to swim in the ocean in the middle of a hurricane, being swept this way and that and battered relentlessly against shoals by an uncontrollable, chaotic, massive force.

So while he’d certainly like to keep a constant eye on his conniving twin, he’s hardly been able to find the time since he shipped Michael off to Vegas. How could he when there were famines, floods, typhoons, earthquakes? Species of plants and animals going extinct? Wars, genocides? Bloody daddy-daughter purity balls? And that was just on Earth.

Thank you for the heads up, Miss Lopez

hey, I’m not one to throw stones, but be careful out there

You have Chloe and Trixie to think of

I’m well aware

But I appreciate the concern

Chloe stirs beside him, smacking her lips and rolling over to snuggle into his side. His heart swells with affection—love, he corrects himself—and another part of him swells as well as she slides one hand up the inside of his thigh.

“Morning, Mr. G” she murmurs, squinting up at him and biting her lip coyly as her hand reaches its destination.

“Good morning, Mrs. G,” he replies with an indulgent grin, leaning down to kiss her lingeringly.

He puts erection-killing thoughts of his brother aside for the moment. His lady love requires his divine intervention, after all.

Some time later, they lie back onto the sheets, sated for now, and Lucifer thinks about his Michael problem again. He sighs heavily.

Chloe props her chin up on her hand to look at him. “Something’s bothering you.” He opens his mouth to quip, and she cuts him off. “And I mean other than just the evangelicals.”

“Which one of us is supposed to be omniscient, anyway?” he gripes. “But you’re right. It’s Michael.”

Lucifer doesn’t miss the way her jaw tenses and the ghost of remembered pain flickers in her eyes, and he hates being the one to bring up bad memories. Trying to keep it from her would be worse, though — a violation of the promises they made to each other after he...ascended, or whatever you want to call it.

“What did he do now?”

“Not sure. Miss Lopez texted me that apparently ‘I’”—he makes exaggerated air quotes—“was spotted in Las Vegas doing something that attracted the attention of the LVPD’s organized crime division. Haven’t looked into it yet.”

Chloe’s brow creases, and she reaches out to toy absently with his hair. His eyes slide shut, and he heaves a contented sigh. “So do you think that because he couldn’t take power in Heaven…”

“He’s scrounging for whatever scraps of it he can find down here? That seems most likely.”

Despite his early aspirations to fix the world, Lucifer had been stymied by the question of free will. He was a staunch believer in it, obviously, but he couldn’t find a way to free the Earth of pain and suffering without fundamentally undermining it. So he and Chloe came to the conclusion that the boundaries of his influence should be Heaven (far too boring) and Hell (clearly a broken system, given that it trapped poor, undeserving souls like Daniel’s but not the souls of the unrepentantly evil). 

And maybe occasional futzing with non-human things. 

Who would it harm, for example, to return the Earth’s atmosphere to the state it was in before the Industrial Revolution? Or to cleanse the oceans of trash every so often? To give the polar ice caps some much-needed cool weather? These were the areas where Dad had truly lacked perspective.

But the point was that he’d determined that his siblings’ free will fell under the same category as humanity’s. As God, it wasn’t his place to influence their choices. He would, as always, respect their desires.

Naturally Michael would be the one to find a way to test his resolve.

“What are you going to do?” Chloe asks.

“Well, first off, not jump to conclusions.”

Chloe scoffs.

“Listen, if I want to give my brother a proper second chance, then I have to give him the opportunity to prove me wrong,” Lucifer reasons. “And if he’s killing mortals or putting Candy in danger, I will gladly beat him to a bloody pulp. But as his brother, not as his God.”

Chloe harrumphs and flops back onto the bed.

“So, what’s my consultant’s evaluation?” he asks.

“Your consultant grudgingly accepts your decision,” she says.

The night’s show ends, and the bussers mop the floors, and Natalie cleans the bar, and Michael delivers the night’s take to Candy, plus a little sweetener courtesy of his business associates in the criminal underworld.

She gives him a cool smile as she accepts the money, making some quip about how much better the club has been doing since she hired him as a bouncer, while he stands in the doorway to her office as straight as he possibly can, his shoulder and the scars on his back screaming at him. He wishes desperately that he could figure out the secret to whatever magic made her want him that night. Maybe he cared less? Maybe he smiled more? Maybe he was more admiring of how she looked? Maybe there was just enough additional money in the stack he handed her?

But nothing seems to make a difference. He stands there like a fool until she pointedly bids him good night, and he heads back to the motel frustrated, with a strange ache in his chest.

Or at least he would, if he were not confronted in the hallway on this particular night by an unwelcome sight. His twin brother, God, and the architect of his ignominious defeat, leans casually against the wall outside of Candy’s office, tugging on his cuffs.

Michael exhales and trudges up to him, squaring his shoulders. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” Lucifer replies. “Other than to ensure that you’re not violating the terms of your parole.”

“I haven’t killed any humans, if that’s what you’re worried about” Michael snaps.

“Haven’t you? Then how is it that I hear you’re now the head of the Italian mob in Vegas?”

“I may have exposed the fears of a certain mafia boss in front of a group of subordinates who were...unhappy about what they heard, but that’s it. If they felt like I was a suitable replacement after witnessing that, then who was I to disagree?” Michael gives him a smug smile.

Lucifer peers closely at his twin, intrigued. “I see. And how is it that you came to be in the same room as this mafia boss and his men, if it wasn’t with the intent of taking over?”

Michael hesitates, eyes darting towards the closed door to Candy’s office.

Lucifer follows his gaze, an incredulous smile breaking over his face. “You did it on Candy’s behalf?” 

“She had a debt to them that she couldn’t pay off, so I offered to help her get it forgiven.” Michael avoids Lucifer’s eyes, suddenly feeling like he’s leaving himself exposed somehow.

Lucifer peers at him closely. “And why is it that you felt the need to do such a kind and helpful thing for your God-appointed babysitter?”

“I一” Michael casts about for a reasonable excuse, not quite sure what the truth is, himself. “I didn’t want to have to find somewhere else to go. And she’s...not as pathetic as most mortals.”

Lucifer lets out a single squawk of laughter. “Mikey, I never knew you had it in you! You like her!”

“No!” Michael denies instinctively. “I don’t like her. She’s a human, for one. And she’s...she’s flighty and bad with money and cares way too much about her appearance and—and sexually promiscuous.” The list of reasons sounds pathetic to his own ears.

“Right,” Lucifer replies skeptically. “Well, regardless, you’re to keep her out of your mess. If I catch wind of her getting tangled up in this mob nonsense, I’m going to come back here and give you a beating that’ll make your wingectomy look like a paper cut.”

“A threat from God, huh?” Michael asks with a bitter smile.

“No, this is very much a threat from your brother.” Lucifer steps away from the wall and into Michael’s space. Michael shrinks back instinctively. The power that radiates off of his twin is tangible, a wave of cosmic force that makes him feel even more insignificant than usual. Michael manages to hold Lucifer’s stare for a heartbeat or two before his gaze falters and slips to the floor.

“Fine,” he mutters. 

“Right!” Lucifer says brightly, just as the door to Candy’s office opens and the woman herself steps out. Her face splits into a bright smile when she sees Lucifer.

“Well, hello, stranger!”

“Candy, darling!” Lucifer steps around his brother and leans down to kiss both her cheeks in greeting. 

“It’s been a long time. Vegas not good enough for you these days?”

“Oh, been too busy, unfortunately. Being the ruler of the universe is a full-time job!”

Candy laughs and pats him on the cheek affectionately. Something cold and ugly roils in Michael’s gut.

“I hope my brother hasn’t been too much of a burden,” Lucifer says, eyeing Michael.

Candy turns to look at him as well. “Not a burden at all. He’s been contributing a lot actually, which is especially helpful considering how flighty and bad with money I am.”

Michael swallows. How much had she overheard?

“Well, considering how ornery, crooked, and miserly he is, I hardly think he’s one to cast stones.” Lucifer grins.

“I’m standing right here,” Michael gripes.

“Then go stand elsewhere,” Lucifer replies, flapping his hand in a “shoo” motion. “Don’t you have a bus to catch or something? I need to discuss something with Candy in private.”

Michael pushes away from the wall with a huff of embarrassment and stalks away towards the exit. He sorely misses being able to exit annoying situations suddenly and dramatically. His phantom wings throb in mourning.

As he opens the back door to let himself out into the alley behind Fletcher’s, he glances back at them over his shoulder. They both fairly glimmer with charisma, beauty, and friendship. Lucifer must be cracking a joke, because Candy laughs and touches him on the arm. She shakes her hair back behind her shoulder in that way she does when she’s accepting applause after a performance—proud and confident and glowing with fulfillment of her deepest desire. 

She’s never looked at me like that, Michael thinks. And never will.

Lucifer walks Candy to her car, slowing his long stride to match hers and enjoying breathing in the cool desert air. All around him he can feel the threads of human excitement of all sorts. If he wanted, he could get lost in this for days. But no, he had an eager, beautiful consort waiting for him back in Los Angeles and business to conduct before he could return to her.

“I barely got any details from you before you dropped him in my lap,” Candy says. “Is there a reason why you’re here? Something I should be worried about?” She seems to be driving at a point. He peeks at her thoughts, feeling a little like a shameful voyeur. It doesn’t feel quite right, but it certainly is useful.

She thinks he’s a crime boss now, that Michael is the family flunkie, that Lucifer was the one who engineered Michael’s precipitous rise to power here. She’s a clever one, that’s for certain, Lucifer thinks fondly. And it’s true that Michael is the family Fredo at the moment. Metaphorically, it’s not far from the truth.

“I wasn’t involved with Michael getting your debt forgiven. That was entirely his doing. And while I may not agree with his methods, I am happy you’re in the clear,” Lucifer says. “Though I do wish you’d asked me first, Candy.”

Candy scoffs and looks at the ground. “I already owe you so much. My club, my life. I can’t ask you for anything else.”

“Believe me, taking Michael on officially makes us even,” Lucifer says with a smile. “If he’d stayed in Los Angeles, the detective likely would have found a way to kill him herself. Regardless, you know as well as I that the mafia is not to be trifled with. If there’s a hint of trouble, call me.”

Candy nods, but avoids his eyes, gesturing to a red Kia. “This is me.”

Lucifer nods, admiring and exasperated by her gumption and her stubborn pride. They are, he thinks, very much alike.

“Well, it was lovely seeing you,” he says.

“Likewise.” She fishes her keys out of her bag and unlocks the car, but pauses with her hand on the door handle. “So I take it you and that detective managed to figure things out?”

Lucifer smiles. “We did. Only quite recently, actually.”

“Do you think it’ll last?”

“Dearie me, I hope so. Not sure I could do my new job without her.”

Candy smiles sadly. “That’s good. I’m happy for you.” She opens the car door, and ducks into the driver’s seat.

Lucifer holds the door gallantly as she settles in and puts on her seatbelt. A thought strikes him, or an insight, maybe. These moments have been coming to him more and more frequently. Times when the chaotic multitudes of events and facts align and crystallize into a particular insight—a new and pure truth that he never would have seen before. He struggles for a moment to put it into words.

“And one more thing, Candy—Michael’s a real bastard and I wouldn’t wish him on anyone, especially not as an enemy. But he doesn’t do favors for anyone lightly, and he certainly doesn’t like most people. Whatever is going on between you—and I promise you, I do not want to know the details—is probably serious to him.”

Candy grins up at him. “Relationship advice from my ex-husband, huh?”

“Apparently it’s the only help you’ll let me give you.”

“Bye, Lucifer.”

“Goodbye, Candy.” He shuts the door and watches her drive away down Las Vegas’s sleepless streets, long after she turns out of view.

Chapter Text

Candy spends the drive home turning Lucifer’s enigmatic and brief appearance over in her mind. He came to chastise his brother, clearly, which meant that Lucifer had nothing to do with Michael’s mafia involvement. Michael took on the Riccis, what, single-handed? And just for the hell of it? It doesn’t make any sense.

She’s so busy trying to reconcile her image of the man—surly, arrogant, penny-pinching, stand-offish, and increasingly puppy dog-eyed as she continues to avoid the topic of their hook-up— with the idea of someone capable of making seasoned criminals cower in deference overnight that she almost misses the car tailing her. It’s a dark-colored Ford, driving just far enough behind her that she almost loses it going through a yellow light. But it accelerates to squeak through the intersection just after the signal turns red, prompting angry horns.

Candy had gotten into the habit of watching for tails over the years. It wasn’t just her creditors, who certainly were not above threatening her personal safety. She’d also had a couple of toxic exes who seemed disinclined to respect their restraining orders, and then there was the time when her bartender had been trying to murder her…

She’d felt safer for the past couple of weeks, since Michael had gotten her debts forgiven. And, to be honest, even since he’d become her bouncer. The number of creepy guys who slipped backstage to make drunken, aggressive passes at her had dropped to zero. She’d almost been able to forget that the world was eternally out to make her life complicated and frightening. But of course she was a fool to let her guard down.

She cuts abruptly across two lanes to make a left turn onto a side street, and the car behind her struggles to do the same. Whoever this person is, they’re not a particularly adept driver. Candy accelerates, her Kia’s engine struggling to comply as she takes a deliberately convoluted route through her neighborhood. But the dark Ford stays doggedly in her rear-view mirror.

She’s so busy watching the car behind her that when she catches sight of two tourists stepping into the crosswalk in front of her, it’s almost too late. She slams on the brakes, her heart beating wildly. Behind her, she hears an abbreviated wail of a siren and a flash of blue lights as the dark Ford eases to a halt on her bumper. The lights flash out from the car’s dashboard 一 a cop in an unmarked vehicle. Well, there were certainly worse people to have tailing you, though Candy doesn’t feel particularly lucky. She puts her car into park and sighs, rolling down her window.

A woman steps out of the Ford and approaches Candy’s driver-side door. She’s in plain clothes but has a gun and badge on her hip. Candy puts on her biggest, most innocent eyes and peers up at her.

“Is there a problem, officer?” she asks.

“Candy Morningstar?” the woman asks.

“Fletcher, not Morningstar,” Candy replies, wiggling her bare ring finger with a heavy sigh. “Divorced.”

“I’m Detective Tanya Jones with the LVPD. Is there a reason you were trying to lose me?”

Candy blinks. “Trying to...what? I was just driving home from work.”

Jones’ lips press into a skeptical line. “You passed your apartment complex three times.”

“Oh, I did? I don’t know where my mind goes sometimes!” she says with a giggle.

Jones sighs and hands Candy a business card. “I was going to stop by your home tomorrow to ask you some questions. Would you mind if we did that now instead?”

“Oh, I don’t mind at all! Night owl, you know. One of the hazards of the business.”

“If you wouldn’t mind heading directly home, then, I’ll follow you.”

“Sure thing!” Candy gives her a megawatt grin and watches her until she gets into her car again until she lets it drop. “Fuck,” she mutters, putting her car in gear.

“Water? La Croix? Açai juice? Something stronger? I have White Claw.” Candy asks breezily, dropping her keys into the bowl beside the door and bustling into her apartment, turning on the lights and hastily gathering some empty takeout containers off the coffee table on her way into the kitchen.

“Water would be great. Is there somewhere we can sit?” Jones asks from the other room.

“Sure! Just make yourself comfortable wherever,” Candy replies, poking her head out of the kitchen and gesturing vaguely towards her couch. She ducks back into the kitchen and fills a glass with water from the tap, taking a calming breath as she braces herself on the sink. Her mind races with the questions the cop might ask and what she might need to say in response. The truth is safest for her, but is it safe for Lucifer? For Michael?

She carries the glass of water back into the living room and sits primly on the chair opposite the detective. “So, what did you want to talk about?”

“Ms. Fletcher, when was the last time you saw your ex-husband?”

“Hmm,” Candy casts her eyes contemplatively up at the ceiling. “I can’t remember. It had to be at least a few years ago.”

“Interesting, because I have surveillance reports telling me he was seen leaving your club at…” Jones consults her notepad. “2:10 this morning. That isn’t the case?”

Candy blinks, mind racing. Michael left at around 2:10, but she and Lucifer chatted for at least another fifteen minutes before they left. Maybe the detective was watching from outside of the alley where she’d parked her car and hadn’t seen Candy and Lucifer walk up from the other side. “Craig was in my club tonight?” she gasps.

Jones’ brow furrows in confusion. “Who’s Craig?”

“My ex-husband, Craig,” Candy says matter-of-factly. “He was great in bed, but sometimes you need more than sexual chemistry to make it work, you know?”

Jones lets out a frustrated breath. “I meant your other ex-husband, Lucifer Morningstar.”

“Ohhh, Lucifer,” Candy says. “Maybe, like...two years ago? He helped me get out of a scary situation.”

“I’ve read your file. Being the victim of attempted murder is no laughing matter.”

“But Lucifer is sooo nice, and he and his friend Ella figured the whole thing out!”

“Ella Lopez?”

“Yeah, I think that was it!”

Jones smiles wryly. “We’ve spoken. So you’re telling me that Lucifer has not been frequenting your club?”

Candy shakes her head, eyes wide.

The detective reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone, tapping for a few moments and then turning it towards Candy. On the screen is a candid photograph of Michael entering the front door of the club, looking how he normally looks, which is to say furtive and surly.

“This was taken three days ago. You’re telling me this is not your ex-husband, Lucifer Morningstar?”

“Oh, no! That’s his brother, Michael. He’s my bouncer.” 

The detective’s brows furrow. “There are no records of Morningstar having a brother.”

“He didn’t do something wrong, did he? If he has a bunch of unpaid parking tickets or something, I can talk to him. Or maybe I can pay some of them? I’ll go get my purse—” Candy makes to stand up, but Jones catches her by the wrist and urges her back down onto the chair with the long-suffering look of someone who’s fully bought into her ditzy act.

“That won’t be necessary, Ms. Fletcher.” Jones gives her a contemplative look, then stands. “Thank you for your time. You have my card. My cell number is on there. If you feel unsafe or have information you’d like to share at any time, don’t hesitate to call.”

Candy looks up at her in wide-eyed confusion. “Oh...okay?” The detective nods politely and heads toward the door. Candy trails after her, opening the door for her and ushering her out.

“Thanks for stopping by!” she says cheerfully.

Jones gives her a condescending smile. “Thank you.”

As soon as the door is closed and locked, Candy slumps back against it, nerves jangling.

Clearly Michael’s less-than-legal activities were not going unnoticed, but she thinks she did an adequate job of convincing the detective that she wasn’t involved with them. But how could there be no record of his existence? Had he really been living that deep in the shadows for his entire life?

For the first time since she offered him a job on that park bench, Michael doesn’t show up for work that night.

Candy sits in her office as the afternoon eases into evening, chewing on the cap of her pen, and looking up sharply every time one of her waiters or dancers walks past, waiting to spot his signature slouched figure. She wants to tell him about her conversation with Detective Jones, to warn him off getting more involved with the Riccis, maybe ask him why the authorities don’t know that he exists—but he never appears.

The hostess mutters in resentment when it’s clear that she’ll have to man the door again. Candy’s sure it’s something unkind about her hiring practices, or Michael’s much-discussed “general creepiness.”

The change in routine doesn’t help Candy’s already-strained nerves. She can’t help but wonder what might have happened to him. If Detective Jones went straight from her apartment to find and arrest him, maybe. Or the mafia put out a hit on him. 

He could just be sick, she tells herself. Or maybe he’d gotten fed up with the job, with being the subject of Lucifer’s called-in favor. She wants to call him, but she’s pretty sure he doesn’t even have a phone. 

Candy tries to shelve her concerns about Michael as she dresses for the show and performs. From the stage, she can see the hostess struggling to juggle money and her reservation book. Just like before Michael arrived, she can manage it, but just barely.

She walks off stage after her last song, dancers rushing past her in the opposite direction to perform the night’s finale, and wanders into the dressing room, distracted. So distracted she doesn’t notice the man standing at the vanity, toying idly with some tubes of lipstick, until she almost runs into him. 

“Well, if it isn’t Candy Fletcher!” he says, turning to look at her with a grin. It’s a mobster known as Jimmy Nuts, her old contact with the Riccis—a man who had gotten her into several predatory loans with the family and threatened her life more than once. She curses herself. There was a time when he’d never be able to walk through the doors of Fletcher’s without her noticing. But even over the few weeks Michael had been manning the door, she’d become accustomed to relaxing her constant vigilance a little. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“Oh, Jimmy!” She exclaims, slipping into her ditzy persona. “It’s been a minute! How are you?”

He leers at her. “My night’s much sweeter now that there’s some Candy in it.”

She sits at her vanity and starts taking off her earrings, affecting an attitude of total ease and innocence. Her mind races. What if Michael’s dead, and the “forgiveness” of her loans has been nullified? “What brings you to Fletcher’s?”

“I need to speak to your boss.”

Her brow creases in puzzlement. “My boss? I’m my own boss.”

“Michael,” he clarifies. “He’s not at his usual spot by the doors.”

Wow, he’s her boss now, huh? If he’s alive, she’s going to have some words with him. “I dunno, he didn’t show up for work today.” She begins to remove her false lashes.

“Well, if you see him, could you deliver a message for me?” Jimmy says with exaggerated patience, like he’s speaking to a child. 

“Sure!”

“Tell him that the big cheeses from New York are coming to town for a visit and want to have dinner with him. Friday night, eight o’clock, at the Viper Club. Can you remember that?”

“Friday night, at eight, at the Viper Club,” she parrots, rolling her eyes inwardly. “There’s going to be a big cheese tasting. Got it!”

“No, honey, the bosses. The heads of the family. They need to vet anyone who’s taking a cut of their business.”

“Oh, okay!” she says brightly. He nods condescendingly and hitches up his loose trousers under his overhanging gut.

“You mind if I have a drink before I go? That bartender of yours is a real knockout.”

She stands to usher him out. “Sure! On the house, of course.”

He gives her ass a squeeze on the way out with one last smirk. “That’s my girl.”

She smiles until he walks out of sight and then lets it fall, allowing herself one full-body shudder. What a slime ball. 

She quickly changes out of her dress into her street clothes and goes to her office. A few weeks after he started, Michael gave her a completed W-4 form that he got somewhere with the address of the motel where he’d been living on it. She digs through her files until she pulls it out with a flourish. Once again, she’s weirdly glad that he’s such an anal-retentive, money-obsessed bastard.

She scans the paperwork, populated with his neat, blocky handwriting—noticing, of course, that he’s opted not to allow her to withhold his taxes—until she locates the address. She types it into her phone, grabs her keys, and heads out.

Candy had assumed the motel would be bad—it’s located in a notoriously shabby part town—but she hadn’t really envisioned the reality of it. The sign outside must once have read “American Value Inn,” but most of the bulbs are burnt out, leaving simply the cryptic question, “can u Inn.” The pavement of the parking lot is cracked and full of aggressive desert weeds. She pulls in next to beat-up 1998 Chrysler Sebring parked haphazardly in front of one of the few rooms with lights on inside. From one of the other rooms, Candy can clearly hear a man and a woman having a screaming argument while a baby cries. The sound is not even slightly drowned out by the drone of many elderly window A/C units running at once.

She heads into the main office, where a teenage boy reclines with his feet up on the desk, asleep, a dog-eared copy of Maxim draped over his face, and some kind of late-night infomercial playing on a small TV on the desk in front of him.

“Excuse me.”

The boy jerks awake, fumbling the magazine off his face and blinking at her blearily. She smiles and leans forward over the desk, planting her forearms and presenting her cleavage to its best advantage.

“Can I help you?” Chris the night manager (according to his name tag) asks, not even bothering to pretend to look her in the eye.

“I hope so,” Candy says, twirling a lock of her hair around one finger. “I had a client call and ask me to meet him here, but he forgot to tell me his room number. His name is Michael?”

The teen grins, giving her a once-over. “Oh yeah, I can help you out. No last name?” He flips open the guestbook and scrutinizes it for a while.

Candy shakes her head coyly. “Don’t get a lot of last names in my business.”

“Here it is. Just ‘Michael,’ room 5.”

“Thanks!” she says brightly, turning to leave.

“Why don’t you come back here after?” he calls after her.

She gives him a coy glance over her shoulder, flipping her hair. “You couldn’t afford me.”

Room 5 is just a few doors past the room with the screaming couple. The blinds are closed, but she can see the dim, flickering light of a TV set illuminating the room, and the muffled sound of recorded voices. She pauses outside the door and listens carefully. There’s still a decent chance that he’s been arrested and the cops are here waiting for her, or whoever might come to visit him, after all. Not to mention the risk that a rival gang decided to take him out.

Then she hears the sound of someone in the room clearing their throat, though, and it definitely sounds like Michael. She raps a few times on the door with one knuckle.

“What?” he calls, irritated. There are heavy footsteps and then the door is flung open. “I’m paid up through the end of—” His mouth snaps shut and his eyes widen when he sees her. “Candy!”

She glances past him at the television at the same time as his eyes dart towards it. It’s porn. Very innocuous, man-on-woman, straight sex porn. She suppresses a smile as he swiftly takes two strides backwards to grab the remote off the bed and fumbles for a moment to find the power button and turn off the TV.

“Sorry to drop in on you,” Candy says wryly. “You didn’t show up for work today.”

Michael turns back to look at her, holding himself stiffly, defensive. “I figured my brother told you that the terms of the favor had been fulfilled, and I should take myself off your hands.”

Candy sighs. So that’s what this was about. “The terms of the favor were fulfilled after I let you crash for a night at the club, as far as I’m concerned.”

Michael scoffs, rolling his eyes. 

Candy continues, ignoring him. “As your employer, though, I expect you to call in when you’re going to miss work.”

“For a position that you created for me,” Michael scoffs. “I hardly think I’m essential to the club.”

Candy grits her teeth. “I’m not running a charity, you know.”

“Believe me, I’ve seen your books. I’m aware.” 

Candy’s ire rises. It’s been a long day, and she really doesn’t need to deal with an overgrown baby’s sulking on top of it. “You’ve been acting like a real bastard, you know? Running a criminal enterprise behind my back, out of my club. Putting the cops onto me. Making moon eyes at me just because I fucked you once,” Candy fumes. “Which was just a rebound, by the way. Me needing to blow off some steam, nothing more. I’m sick of needy men who want me to be their perfect fantasy girl.”

Michael’s lips press together tightly, then when he speaks it’s like he’s letting something long-bottled-up escape in a rush. “Oh, I have no illusions about your perfection, Candy. Rebounding after yet another failed relationship, right? One after the other, all going the same way. And you’re finally starting to wonder—maybe you’re the common denominator. Maybe it’s not that the relationships just weren’t meant to be. Maybe it’s that you’re unlovable.” 

Candy blanches, and he smiles in bitter satisfaction, a smile that doesn’t successfully mask the despair in his eyes. He ducks his head, his crooked shoulder seeming to become more pronounced. Candy’s chin wobbles for a moment, but then tilts up in defiance. Her eyes go steely.

“Right back at you.”

She stares up at him, suddenly aware of how close they’ve moved towards each other during the course of the exchange. His breath comes in unsteady gusts through his long nose as he looks down at her, his eyes black and piercing in the dim light of the motel room.

He takes her by her shoulders and kisses her. He’s not hesitant or gentle. He pours all his bitterness and insecurity into it, and she gives it right back, meeting his bruising lips with her own, using her teeth and tongue to communicate all of her frustration. Her hands fist in his turtleneck, and he clutches her ass and hauls her up effortlessly against his body. His insane strength, not at all apparent from his relatively slim frame, continues to amaze her.

“I want you,” he says hoarsely, mouth breaking away from hers to kiss her jaw, her neck.

“Michael, wait—” she gasps. As much as she’d love to let his whirlwind of bitter, needy desire sweep her up and make her forget about her problems, they need to talk.

He pulls clumsily at her clothes, too lust-clouded to figure out how to get her top off. She tries pushing at his chest, but she might as well be pushing a boulder. He doesn’t seem to notice. Warning bells start going off in her head. Is this really going to happen to her?

“Michael, no,” she says, an edge of fear voice. He drops her instantly, as if he’s been burned, recoiling, a horrified look on his face. She takes a step back, biting her bottom lip and averting her eyes.

“I’m—I didn’t mean to—” he stammers.

“It’s fine,” Candy says, catching her breath and composing herself. “I just...wanna say what I came here to tell you.” She moves over to the lone, vinyl-upholstered armchair by the window and gestures for him to sit opposite her on the bed. He does, planting his elbows on his knees and putting his head in his hands, fingertips pressing against his temples.

“You said I put the cops onto you,” he prompts, sounding tired.

“After I left the club last night, a police detective followed me to my apartment,” she begins. He looks up at her sharply. “She was asking about you. Well, she was asking about Lucifer. Er, she thought you were Lucifer. She didn’t seem to know that you exist.”

Michael nods, as if this is unsurprising. “What did you tell her?”

“Just your name, and that you’re my bouncer.”

“She doesn’t suspect that you’re...involved in my business?”

“I doubt it.”

He stands stiffly, walking to the door and opening it, studiously avoiding her eyes. “If that’s all, I’ll let you go.”

“It’s not all.”

He glances at her sharply. “What?”

“Jimmy Nuts showed up at the club tonight and wanted to tell you that the heads of the family from New York are coming to town and they want to have dinner with you.”

“Jimmy Nuts,” Michael repeats, lip curling in distaste. “Sorry you had to be exposed to that.”

“I’m used to it,” she says.

The corner of his mouth twitches up ever-so-slightly in a smile, that spark of something like admiration in his eyes that she never sees him show to anyone else. “I bet you played him like a fiddle.”

She stands and joins him by the door. He looks down at her, eyes dark and inscrutable. “So are you going to go?”

Michael sighs, contemplative. “Maybe.”

“You know you have to go, right?”

“I don’t have to do anything,” he retorts.

Candy’s jaw drops at his audacity. “As long as criminals are showing up at my club to do business with you, I have a say in how you do things. And I say you’ve gotta go, or else they’ll definitely have you killed.”

“They can’t kill me,” Michael says dismissively.

“Well, even if that were true, they can certainly kill me,” she replies, grim.

He blinks at her, mouth dropping open, as if he hadn’t considered this. Candy rolls her eyes. “Come in early tomorrow. We have a lot of planning to do.”

Chapter Text

The Viper Club lies nestled in the shadows between two hulking casinos like its reptilian eponym might between two boulders: tense, watchful, and deadly. The club is closed to the public tonight for a very exclusive event, and instead of the line of revelers that normally wait behind its velvet rope, the front of the building is dead quiet. Intermittently, sleek, black, anonymous cars pull up the front door and disgorge men of varying shapes, sizes, and ages, and their escorts, who are almost invariably tall, blonde, twenty-something, and curvaceous.

At 8:13, a hired Bentley rolls to a stop at the curb. The driver hurries around the car to open the rear door, only for it to swing open as he approaches, inches away from knocking him onto his ass on the sidewalk. A tall, scarred, dark-haired man in a silk shirt and a loose-fitting sharkskin suit, with a gold chain around his neck, steps out of the car, gives the club’s façade an appraising look, and extends his hand to help his companion out after him. She’s perhaps the most tall, blonde, and curvaceous of all the night’s specimens 一 aided by a truly breathtaking pair of stiletto heels 一 if perhaps not quite twenty-something.

She winks at her companion, adjusts the hem of her exceptionally short mini-dress, and takes his arm.

“You ready?”

The corners of his mouth quirk in an uncomfortable grimace. “As I’ll ever be.”

She stretches upward and kisses his cheek. He pulls back to look at her, surprised.

“For luck,” she explains.

“Right,” he replies, turning away to stare down the entrance to the club, emblazoned with the logo of a snake’s head with the mouth open to strike. “Let’s get this over with.”

Five days earlier…

Monday

Michael is already sitting at a table inside of an empty Fletcher’s when Candy arrives at 10:03, a mere six hours after she left him in the doorway of his crappy motel room, staring after her with a mix of longing and consternation.

She places a Starbucks cup on the table in front of him. “I didn’t know what you liked, so I got you a caramel latte. Everyone likes caramel, right?”

He blinks at it like it’s something alien while she takes off her jacket, juggling her own grande strawberry crème frappuccino. He eventually picks it up and takes a tentative sip, apparently finding it acceptable. She sits in the chair opposite him and pulls out a notepad and a pen.

“So,” she begins. “What’s the grift?”

He looks at her blankly. “What?”

“With the Riccis. What’s your overall plan? What are you trying to get out of them? What’s your exit strategy?”

He folds his arms defensively, looking embarrassed. “I don’t really have one.”

“So…you just took over a major mob family for...what? Shits and giggles?”

“It felt like I was killing two birds with one stone. Getting your debt forgiven and being able to supplement my income with a percentage of their business.”

Candy stares at him, aghast, for a moment before looking up at the ceiling and taking a deep, calming breath. “How much money have you made off them so far?”

“Including or excluding what I’ve given to you?”

Candy sighs, resigned. “Including.”

“$159,620. Give or take.”

“Yeah, sounds real ballpark,” she replies with a wry smile. “So in the future you see yourself as, what? A mafia don?”

He averts his eyes, staring down at the coffee cup in front of him. “I don’t see myself as anything in the future, anymore.”

Candy has a hard time comprehending someone who could both be so clearly in the grips of deep depression and also willing to take on the mafia on a whim. “You’re making money like someone who thinks he has a future,” she says, gently nudging his foot under the table with hers.

“Money is power, here on Earth. For what little that’s worth,” he mutters. “I hate being powerless.”

“Well, you’re not wrong. Anyway,” she says, trying to brighten the tone of the conversation. “While you may not have any long-term plans, I certainly do. And I don’t think they’re compatible with the New York heads of the family deciding to remove you and take back the thousands of dollars you’ve put into Fletcher’s. Which, again, I’m very appreciative of. But I’d like to keep my bed horse head-free, if you know what I mean.” 

He blinks at her, nonplused.

“The Godfather? The horse head in the movie producer’s bed? ‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse?’ Nothing ringing a bell?” Candy asks, scandalized, as he shrugs. “We have got to fix that. You can’t run the Vegas mafia with no knowledge of the greatest mob movie of all time.” She shakes her head, refocusing on the conversation at hand. “Anyway. I’ve been thinking about it, and the way I see it, the only way to convince these bigwigs from New York that they should leave you alone is to make it clear that you can make them more money than your predecessor.”

Michael nods. “Makes sense. But how? The Riccis already squeezing all they can get out of businesses in loans and protection payments.”

“I don’t know.” Candy leans back in her chair with a huff and sucks idly on the straw to her frappuccino. 

Michael’s finger taps on the surface of the table in arrhythmic bursts. “Fear,” he says, after a long silence.

Candy raises a questioning eyebrow.

“They’re full of it,” Michael explains. “And most of it is fear of being apprehended by the authorities, or fear of being killed for ratting the others out to the authorities. Most of them, deep down, are terrified of what they do. They love the money and the power, but they hate the business.”

Candy leans forward slowly, eyes widening. “Michael, you’re a genius.”

He casts her a puzzled, flattered look. “I am?”

“Wait here for a second.” Candy leaps to her feet and almost sprints backstage. A few seconds later, she reappears, a pink notebook in tow.

“Every mob boss’s dream is to go legit,” Candy says, leafing through the notebook. “To be able to maintain their standard of living via legal business, so they’re not constantly looking over their shoulder, like you said.” She stops leafing on a page filled with her messy, enthusiastic scrawl, alongside several sketches that look like floorplans, and turns it around to face Michael. “And the mafia in Vegas is dying, has been dying for, like, fifty years. They’ve barely been hanging on ever since gambling was legalized and they lost their casino income. But tourists still love the idea of mingling with the criminal underworld when they come here, so that’s why a bunch of their businesses like the Viper Club hang on.

“And then there’s the fact that most of Vegas is effectively Disney World with gambling now, and Millennials aren’t into it. Why throw your money away on slots and video poker here when there’s online gambling and loot crates in video games that you can get anywhere? The city itself is gonna die in a few decades from that, if global warming doesn’t force us out first. That’s where this comes in.” She gestures to the notebook.

Michael squints at it. “What am I looking at?”

Candy rolls her eyes, but eagerly begins pointing out different details of the plan laid out in the notebook. “This is my dream version of Fletcher’s. It’d be a boutique hotel-resort-casino, but totally immersive and experiential. Taking you back to what old Vegas was like in the early ‘50s. With all the glitz, glamor, and danger. The sense that you’re outside of time. We’d have gambling, but with no keycards or wristbands or apps. All analog machines. Guests could purchase period wardrobe if they wanted. Staff would effectively be reenactors. All the decorations would be totally authentic—”

Michael looks at her skeptically. “You’re proposing Las Vegas meets Colonial Williamsburg?”

“Colonial Williamsburg, but sexy, and with booze. And what better way to market it than by saying it’s run by actual mafiosos?”

“This sounds like it’d cost a lot of money.”

Candy’s face falls. “Well, to get it up and running, yeah.” She looks down at the notebook longingly and sighs.

Michael feels something twist uncomfortably in his chest. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work,” he amends quickly. “We may just need to pitch it differently.”

She looks up at him and smiles, her big brown eyes lovely and fathomless, and the unpleasant sensation eases. “What are you thinking?”

Wednesday

Candy takes Michael to the Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian. He stares in disdain at the excesses of Peak American Capitalism and the hordes of tourists laden with shopping bags as Candy leads him through the chaos.

“Why are we here, again?”

“You have to look the part, or else it’s over the moment you step inside the club,” she explains, weaving between clusters of Chinese tourists examining a large illuminated map of the mall and making a beeline for the looming facade of a department store. 

“What’s wrong with how I dress? It’s been convincing enough, so far,” he asks, defensive, looking down at his gray turtleneck, brown jacket, and beige chinos. She glances back and stifles a grin at the childish pout on his face.

“You look like a cross between a college professor and a 1960s Bond villain,” she replies, looking pointedly down at his sensible, comfortable, and hideous brown shoes. “Not a businessman, and certainly not a mobster. They need to see that you’re one of them.”

He stands in the aisles of the men’s department as she navigates the racks, pulling out items and slinging them over her arm until the pile gets too large and she hands them off to him. He makes no comment on her choices, but his expression gets sourer and sourer the longer they wander.

“This must be enough,” he says eventually in an explosive rush as she’s comparing two similar neckties. Candy glances back at him and sizes up the hefty stack of suit coats, trousers, and shirts draped over his arms.

“I guess it’s somewhere to start, at least. I can find more while you’re getting changed.” 

They find a blessedly deserted cluster of dressing rooms in a tucked-away corner and Candy arranges the clothes into outfits before sending Michael into a dressing room with them. She waits on a chair outside, admiring herself in the trio of full-length mirrors at the end of the short hallway. Michael takes longer than she’d expect to change, the rustling of fabric punctuated by soft curses and frustrated exhalations. 

Eventually, he emerges in the first suit she picked: a silvery pale gray in a slim cut that shimmers in the fluorescent light but is clearly too small for the broadness of Michael’s torso. His posture sometimes makes it hard to remember that he has the shoulders of an Olympic swimmer.

Candy taps one finger on her lips contemplatively. “Hmm, well, clearly we’d need to go at least a size up on the jacket. Can I see what it looks like with just the shirt?”

Michael’s jaw clenches, but he obeys, pushing his shoulders back and starting to wriggle out of the jacket awkwardly. A particularly aggressive jerk of one arm attempting to free itself makes him hiss in pain and he pauses for a moment, eyes closed and face pale, composing himself, the jacket still tangled around his elbows.

“I didn’t—I’m sorry—I can help,” Candy stammers, reaching out to stop him, her hand landing on his upper arm.

“It’s fine,” he replies harshly, resuming his largely ineffective struggling. “I don’t need your help.”

Candy shoots him a flat look and steps behind him to tug downward on the jacket’s cuffs, quickly freeing his arms and removing it. 

“I got it most of the way off,” he says, peevish and embarrassed but clearly relieved, as she steps back around him, the jacket folded over her arm. She gives him an appraising look. The shirt is a deep crimson that looks attractive against his warm complexion. He has it buttoned all the way up despite the fact that he’s not wearing a tie. She smiles to herself and reaches up, popping the first few buttons open and adjusting the collar until it falls open to reveal his long neck and the dusting of chest hair below his collarbone. She smooths one hand down his chest, admiring her work. He watches her closely, eyes black and inscrutable.

“Not bad,” she says, cocking her head and smiling up at him.

He tries the next outfit on without hesitation. In fact, the next five outfits pass without so much as an impatient eye roll as she examines him, making him turn this way and that to appraise jackets and trousers that, according to him, run the gamut from mildly uncomfortable to straightjacket-adjacent, and shirts representing a portion of the visible spectrum altogether too eye-searing for his tastes. 

It’s only when she’s waiting for him the next time he exits the dressing room holding a black velour tracksuit that he finally protests.

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I draw the line there.”

“What did we say about needing to fit in?”

“I agree it’s important, but I have standards. It’s a formal dinner, not a gym.”

“I promise it’ll be more comfortable than any of the other ones.”

“No.”

Candy steps closer to him, hands sneaking up to splay across his hard stomach stroking the slick fabric of his blue silk shirt ever-so-slightly. She blinks up at him entreatingly and bites her lip. “Please? For me?”

He glares down at her, stubbornness warring with longing on his face. “It’s not fair when you do that.”

She grins. “But it works, doesn’t it?”

He smiles, close-lipped and tight, the sting of defeat tempered by obvious admiration, and snatches the tracksuit from her hands before retreating to the dressing room.

Candy sits back in her chair, enjoying the rush of victory, when she notices the white wifebeater still folded neatly on the chair next to her. Really the pièce de résistance of the whole ensemble. She grabs it and stands, tapping briefly on the dressing room door before cracking it open. It’s a small cubicle, and Michael is oriented more or less facing her, obscured by the door, but she gets a clear view of his bare back in the mirror opposite her as he finishes pulling off his shirt. She can’t hold back a gasp.

Standing out starkly against the smooth, tan planes of his shoulder blades are two symmetrical, deep-red, crescent-shaped burns. They look fresh, layers of flesh still blistered, twisted, and charred as if by some intense, skin-melting heat. If she hadn’t seen the evidence of numerous pristine shirts on his back and off, she’d assume they were still weeping blood or pus. When could he possibly have gotten those? They look fresh, as far as she can tell with her near-nonexistent knowledge of severe burns, and yet he’s been here for weeks, going about his life apparently without issue beyond a certain stiffness in one arm. Yet they must be agonizing! He should probably be in a hospital! She thinks back to him struggling to get out of the too-tight jacket she forced him into mere minutes ago and cringes, horrified at herself.

“What is it?” he asks, the nearness of his voice on the other side of the door jarring her attention away from the gruesome sight of his back.

“I-I forgot to give you this,” she stammers, thrusting the undershirt through the gap in the door.

He snorts. “Of course.”

“Sorry,” she blurts.

“You’re feeling remorseful now? After manipulating me so expertly? Maybe I overestimated you,” he teases.

She manages a strangled hum of agreement and closes the door again, retreating to her seat and trying to quell her sudden nausea.

Soon he re-emerges, spreading his arms and spinning in a slow circle to model his guido-chic getup. He has managed to mimic the correct styling perfectly—the jacket unzipped half-way and the sleeves pushed up towards his elbows. Candy gives a wan smile.

He frowns. “After all this build-up, I thought you’d be happier.”

“I am, I am,” she insists, shaking herself. “Just…thinking about something else. It’s perfect. We’re definitely buying it.”

“No, we’re not.”

“Yes, we are.”

“I’m not wasting space in my closet on it.”

“Then I will.”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

He seems satisfied at their renewed banter, but gives her one last piercing sidelong look before returning to the dressing room.

They sit in silence as he changes back into his own clothes, the quiet only broken by the muted murmur of distant shoppers, quiet ‘90s R&B piping through the overhead speakers, and the soft rustling of fabric. 

Eventually, Candy stands and puts one hand against the smooth wood of the door. “Do they hurt?” she asks softly.

There’s a long silence on the other side. “I don’t need your pity.” So, yes, then.

“What…are they?”

He responds with a single, humorless bark of laughter. “My brother’s ‘mercy.’”

Lucifer did that? To his own brother? Silly, sweet, ostentatious, lovesick Lucifer? But also…Lucifer, who helped her turn her murderous former bartender into a gibbering, guilty mess with the help of a wall of mirrors and a handful of words. Lucifer, who broke into her apartment and waited for her just to take back a ring. She swallows with some difficulty.

“We should…can we get you help? Have you seen a doctor?”

“Wouldn’t make any difference. I deserve them, so I have them.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“That's what it’s all been, since the beginning of time.” His voice is thick with despair, and resignation.

Candy lets her head fall against the door with a soft thunk. A warning goes off in her brain, screaming at her to leave. Michael, Fletcher’s, Vegas—this whole insane plan. It’s all more complicated and gruesome than she bargained for. Michael is much more complicated and gruesome than she bargained for. 

She sighs. The problem was, she’d never been able to tell when that mental alarm was warning her away from a relationship destined to go horribly wrong, or one that was simply more complex than she was prepared for. Over the years, she’d sometimes ignored it with disastrous consequences, and sometimes heeded it only to lose amazing relationships, amazing people—to drive away those that she ended up needing the most.

“I’m gonna go pay for this stuff. I’ll meet you outside,” she says eventually, and flees before he can say anything more.

Candy is waiting for him when he emerges after several minutes of staring at his own scarred face in the mirror. Giving her plenty of opportunity to leave without him, if she wants. To put as much distance between them as possible, as any sane human would. 

“Be not afraid,” Michael remembers saying over and over, ineffectually, after he realized his powers’ effect on their kind. “Be not afraid,” more and more insistently, as they quailed before him, soiled themselves in terror, prayed for God’s mercy. Until one day he found himself enjoying it. They were pitiable, he realized. Pathetic, really. Animals, slaves to their baser instincts, to the old, simple parts of their brains that knew nothing but fear and desire.

He’d almost forgotten what it was like not to want to inspire fear.

She’s standing by the department store’s window display surrounded by shopping bags, with a thick garment bag slung over her shoulder. She meets his eye, unwavering and direct. Seeing him. Candice Fletcher is not afraid. Relief pours through him, and the rising tide of anxiety abates.

“What now?” he asks, with forced nonchalance.

She hands him the garment bag and then picks the other shopping bags up off the floor.

“We have one more stop to make.”

The pawn shop is in a bad part of town, nearer to his motel than to the Strip. There are bars on the windows, and signs that warn about the presence of security systems and surveillance cameras. A bell above the door jangles cheerfully when they walk in.

“Candy!” a jovial voice calls from the back of the shop. A broad, bald, middle-aged man with well-worn laugh lines stands behind the counter, in the middle of cleaning what appears to be a dismantled 19th century rifle. “It’s been so long! My supply of wedding rings and cufflinks has been sorely lacking without your business.” 

“Good to see you, too, Hassan,” Candy replies, flushing and glancing furtively back at Michael. He raises an eyebrow and turns to examine the wide assortment of objects filling the small shop while Candy goes to the counter. 

“You finally have something to sell me again?”

“No, we’re here to buy.”

Hassan jerks his head in Michael’s direction. “This your boyfriend, eh? He gonna buy you a nice engagement ring, hm? Make an honest woman out of you? I have just the thing for you.”

“No,” Candy says hurriedly. Another quick glance backward reveals that Michael is staring intently at a katana. “Actually we were looking to buy some jewelry for him.”

“Him?” Hassan asks, skeptically eyeing Michael’s clothes.

“Investment pieces,” she amends.

“Listen, as long as you don’t need to know the provenance of nothing, you can invest in anything in my shop.” He spreads his arms magnanimously.

Candy browses the glass display case, picking items here and there and presenting them to Michael to either grudgingly approve or veto. He gives the stamp of approval (shrugging ambivalently) to a gold chain tennis bracelet and a couple of heavy rings. But he balks completely when she starts presenting him with crosses and crucifixes on necklaces.

“Are you an atheist?” she wonders aloud.

“I wish,” he grumbles..

“You know this is just a costume, right? It doesn’t mean anything.” She ignores Hassan’s quizzical look.

“I know what it is,” Michael snaps. “Just—let me look.” He leans over the display case and scans it rapidly, until suddenly he jabs his finger triumphantly at a chain with a small gold medallion on it. Hassan removes the necklace from the case obligingly and Candy picks it up to examine it. In the center is a relief of an angel wielding a sword and stepping on the head of another figure on the ground. Inscribed around the perimeter of the medallion are the words, “SAINT MICHAEL PRAY FOR US.”

“Your patron saint, huh?”

“Something like that,” he mutters.

Thursday

When he comes to bring her the take the next day after the club closes, she reels him into her office, one hand tugging on the fabric of his jacket. He’s annoyed at the way his cock perks up like an eager puppy every time she touches him.

“So I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided.”

“Decided what?” he asks, confused and excited, glancing down at her cleavage as she releases his jacket.

“You need to see The Godfather before tomorrow night.”

“What?”

“Not only will it teach you about the mafia, but also there’s a decent chance you’re gonna get killed, and it’s really a bucket list kinda movie.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Nope, not gonna happen. I have it on Blu-Ray, and a nice TV. You’re not tired, are you?”

“I don’t sleep much.”

“Me neither. But fair warning: it’s long.”

Before he knows it, they’re in her cramped Kia again, Candy chattering on about the peak of Coppola’s artistic prowess and the deep, dark hues of the cinematography while she drives him to her apartment. For some reason, he finds it hard to deny her anything. After so long being everyone’s least favorite sibling and driving away any human he comes in contact with, having someone want to spend time with him is intoxicating. Seductive.

They park, and enter an elevator that climbs slowly through the sleeping building to her apartment, high above the Vegas lights. He feels a strange thrill as he follows her inside, watching her perform her coming home routine: dropping her keys in a dish by the door, kicking off her shoes, flicking on lightswitches, closing the blinds. He toes off his shoes hesitantly just inside the door and pads after her.

“I’m gonna make popcorn,” she says, breezing into the kitchen. “Make yourself comfortable...wherever.” She gestures vaguely to the plush couch before ducking out of sight.

Michael settles awkwardly into her space. It’s brightly decorated and feminine but at its heart, eminently practical, just like its owner.

“You want a beer?” she calls from the kitchen.

“Sure,” he replies.

A few minutes later, she reappears with a huge bowl of popcorn and two beers, placing them on the coffee table, kneeling to fiddle with the Blu-Ray player for a bit, and then picking up what he’d assumed was a throw blanket from her lounge chair. It turns out to be a kind of half-robe made out of fleecy fabric that she sticks her arms through before settling at the other end of the couch, only her head, hands, and the pink-toenailed tips of her toes visible underneath it. She’s never been less sexy, and yet something in his chest clenches uncomfortably.

She picks up the remote, turns to him with melodramatic solemnity and asks, “Are you ready?”

He can’t restrain a half-grin. “As I’ll ever be.”

She hits play and grabs the bowl of popcorn, plopping it on the couch between them, as the movie’s theme music begins to play.

“I believe in America…” 

Michael is instantly enraptured despite himself, and despite his disinterest in humanity and the particularities of the ethnic criminal group he’s currently commandeering. 

The story is immediately, painfully familiar: the distant, enigmatic, all-powerful godfather. His many children, supplicants, and underlings all vying for his approval and favor. Michael feels instant antipathy for Michael Corleone, the film’s protagonist, despite their shared name. The favorite son who left the family business behind and fell in love with an outsider. Who returns home only to be instantly embraced again.

But as the story unravels, his opinion shifts. Michael Corleone is no Lucifer, no avatar of light and desire. He sinks into the shadows readily, eagerly. Executes his family’s enemies with cold-blooded efficiency. Humanity is violence, Michael thinks—wanton bloodshed and pain. Michael remembers the sensation of Azrael’s blade sinking into Remiel’s duplicitous breast, of that stubborn human’s blood rushing over his hand, the sickening sound of Zadkiel’s splintered staff thrust into Chloe Decker’s abdomen. The burns on his back throb with searing pain, the paroxysm of tension and terror that had gripped him as he waited for Lucifer’s righteous punishment burned forever into his flesh一a physical reminder of the killing blow that would never fall.  

The film climaxes with a series of murders一Michael Corleone eliminating all his adversaries一interspersed with a scene of a baptism: the old, familiar words humans used to pledge their children’s souls to his Father. Corleone renounces Satan even as acts are done in his name that will surely condemn him to Hell. The movie concludes with one final assassination, that of his sister’s abusive, traitorous husband. The newly-anointed godfather lies about it shamelessly to his wife before closing her out of his office with an air of finality. The message of the film is clear—revenge, grief, and a lust for power drained all the gentleness, love, and honesty out of this man. What remained was nothing but a hollow shell, a gnawing hunger for power that could never be satisfied.

Michael feels ill. He turns to look at Candy as the movie’s mournful theme plays over the credits. She’s fallen asleep while he sat enraptured, the empty popcorn bowl long-relocated to the coffee table and replaced with her legs. Her feet still peek out from under her robe-blanket and press against his thigh. Michael tugs the blanket down to cover them and shakes her calf gently. Candy murmurs something and burrows deeper into the couch cushion but doesn’t rouse.

He waffles for a moment, but then lifts Candy into his arms, still sleeping, and carries her into her bedroom, doing his best to ignore the laundry haphazardly scattered around the room as he pulls back the covers and puts her to bed. 

He closes the door after him as he returns to the living room, opening the blinds to look outside. The lights of the Strip are gradually beginning to blink off as the night draws to a close. The dawn breaks blue and clear over Sin City on a fateful Friday morning.

Chapter Text

Where Fletcher’s is bright, small, and intimate, The Viper Club is dim, cavernous, and intimidating. Candy and Michael are ushered through a velvet-curtained archway into a large, two-tiered room. The upper tier is U-shaped and lined with plush leather semicircular booths. At the two extremities of the U are bars, one abandoned tonight and one manned by a dutiful, stone-faced bartender. At the open end of the U is the stage backed by gold-trimmed emerald curtains and lit dramatically. The curtains and the club’s dark, wood-paneled walls seem to disappear into the high, dimly-lit ceiling.

Three carpeted steps down from the upper tier is the main floor, presumably filled with many tables on a normal night but today housing only one massive, white tableclothed dining table. Around the table mill at least a dozen mafia bosses and their dates, sipping on glittering tumblers of liquor and making small talk.

The conversation doesn’t cease when they enter—and in fact it doesn’t even wane—but Michael can sense the eyes of everyone in the room on them, sizing them up. There’s a long, pregnant pause.

“Ooh, I’ve never actually been to The Viper Club before!” Candy squeals, jiggling on the balls of her feet excitedly and clutching his arm. “I heard they make the best strawberry daiquiri in town! Could you order me one, honey?”

“Of course, honey,” Michael says obligingly, flagging down one of the handful of waiters standing around the club’s perimeter.

One of the mafiosos takes this obvious interruption as an opportunity to approach them. It’s Vinny, Michael’s direct subordinate among the Vegas Riccis.

“Michael!” he says with an anxious deference. “I’m happy you could finally make it. The bosses from New York don’t take too kindly to being made to wait around.”

Michael snakes an arm around Candy’s waist, hand settling casually at her hip. “My apologies. I had things to do, if you catch my drift.”

Vinny’s eyes track from Michael’s sly grin to Candy’s cleavage and back. He leers. “Oh, I catch it, alright. Anyway, the don’s been wanting to meet you. Best not to keep him waitin’.”

He leads the two of them down the steps to the main floor and towards a lean older man who turns to regard them as they approach. He has a hawklike profile, sharp black eyes, and a mouth framed by lines that could suggest either mirth or cruelty. At one time, he was certainly conventionally handsome, though age has stolen some of that and replaced it with an appearance that might instead be called “distinguished.” He wears a dark blue suit similar to some of the pricier ones Candy tried to dress Michael in earlier in the week, before he nixed them on the basis of budget alone.

“Don Carlo Ricci, this is Michael, our new head of Vegas operations,” Vinny says. Michael extends a hand to shake and Don Carlo takes it, cocking his head curiously.

“Just ‘Michael,’ I hear?” Don Carlo asks, in a consciously tamed and educated, but still-present, New Jersey accent. “Hard to trust a man with no last name in this business. A man with no family, no lineage.”

“I have a family,” Michael replies smoothly. “I just don’t see how they’re relevant to my abilities in handling business.”

Don Carlo hums noncommittally in reply. “A little birdie in the FBI tells me your real name is Lucifer Morningstar. A Los Angeles fixer of some repute. Several of my connections on the East Coast have even done business with him. Known for working with the police, though. Is that the case?”

Michael blinks, realizing abruptly that in all the hours spent plotting and preparing for this dinner with Candy over the past week, he’d hardly spared his twin a thought. It’s maybe the longest he’d ever gone without doing so in the long millennia of his life. His already-insincere smile fades, and his voice turns colder than he intends. “I assure you, it’s not. He’s my brother, but we’re not on...good terms.”

“I see,” Don Carlo replies indecisively with a final, piercing glance at him before turning to Candy. “And who is this vision you’ve brought with you?”

“This is一”

“Candy Fletcher, so nice to meet you,” Candy interjects, extending her hand and giggling when Don Carlo takes it and bows over it, lips grazing her knuckles. A strange sensation, a suffocating pressure, flares in Michael’s chest and his hand unconsciously slides from where it was resting on her lower back to grip her waist, pulling her closer to him.

“Proprietor of Fletcher’s, of course,” Don Carlo continues, still holding Candy’s hand. “Your club is a Vegas institution. Almost as old as this one. The pleasure is all mine. And my condolences on your father’s passing.”

Michael watches Candy with admiration as her face crumples believably into an expression of fresh grief. She even summons tears to her eyes, sniffling as she nods swiftly and gazes gratefully into the mafia boss’s eyes. “Thank you, that means so much. I miss him, like, every day.”

“I’m sure,” Don Carlo says, smiling sympathetically and patting her hand. The moment his eyes drift away from her, his friendly smile disappears, like a mask summarily discarded. When his eyes meet Michael’s again, they’re flinty and inscrutable. “Well, I have other guests to greet. We’ll speak more later.”

With that, he pivots away, hands already extended in greeting to another couple who have just arrived. He’s replaced smoothly by a waiter who serves Candy her strawberry daiquiri and Michael a tumbler of ice-cold gin, neat. Then they’re alone again, milling around in the growing crowd of dinner guests.

“Could have gone worse,” Candy murmurs over the lip of her drink.

“Fucking Lucifer,” Michael hisses.

Candy elbows him gently in the ribs. “Hey, that’s my ex-husband you’re talking about.”

“Don’t remind me,” he grouses, taking a large gulp of gin.

“Well, if it isn’t the guest of honor!” a grating voice calls too loudly from behind them. Michael wheels around to see Jimmy Nuts, gut protruding over the waistband of some too-small polyester trousers and sweaty hand clamped on the hip of a woman with a vacant smile plastered on her face and fake breasts nearly bursting out of a tight purple minidress. “Happy you could make it, boss,” he says, ducking his head deferentially. “There was a minute there when I wasn’t sure my invitation would get delivered right, ya know?” He winks at Michael, shooting him a conspiratory smile and jerking his head in Candy’s direction. Michael shoots him a flat stare.

To her credit, Candy doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the insult. “What’s your name?” she instead asks Jimmy Nuts’ date politely.

“Oh,” the woman says, blinking in surprise at being addressed. “Cynthia. You?”

“I’m Candy. I own Fletcher’s.”

Cynthia’s eyes spark with interest. “Oh! I hear the dancers have it real good over there! They don’t even need to escort on top of dancing.”

“You’re a dancer?”

“Yeah, I dance sometimes at the burlesque show at Caesar’s. But escorting pays better.” She gestures broadly at their surroundings. Jimmy adjusts his tie, looking embarrassed. 

“If you’re ever looking for extra work, I’ve got openings,” Candy says, producing a business card from somewhere in her décolletage and handing it to the woman. “Sometimes my girls need a night or two off. The pay’s good, and we have a strict ‘No creeps’ policy,” she says, giving Jimmy Nuts a pointed look.

Cynthia blinks down at the business card in her hands, and then back up at Candy, beaming. “Thanks! I-I’ll definitely call!”

“All right, that’s enough of that,” Jimmy mutters, steering Cynthia away from them.

“Nicely handled,” Michael murmurs, gazing down at Candy as she sips her drink, a sly smile on her face. She’s really a master at this, he marvels. She could make anyone underestimate her and then expertly turn that miscalculation into a weakness, at which point she could disarm, manipulate, or humiliate with ease. He tugs her closer, thinking that it wouldn’t be out of character to kiss her now, just a little, given that she’s meant to be his girlfriend. Nothing at all to do with the fact that he also wants to, and she’s tilted her head up to shoot him a smile full of challenge—

“Dinner is served!” a waiter announces loudly from the table in the center of the hall. “Please find your way to your seats.”

Candy glances away, towards the dining table, and the moment is broken. Michael huffs in frustration, hand dropping reluctantly from where it was pressed against the smooth skin exposed by her dress’s low-cut back, and ushers her ahead of him. They wander together with the other guests towards the table, milling around it for a moment as they all scan the elegantly hand-calligraphed place cards for their names. Michael and Candy are seated just to the left of Don Carlo at the head of the table, obviously a favored position. Michael is vindictively pleased to note that Jimmy Nuts is seated at the opposite end.

He pulls out Candy’s chair for her, and she gives him an appreciative smile as she sits. He settles in after, adjusting his posture and his new jacket carefully as he scoots his chair up to the table.

“Good to see some of the younger generation still have some old-fashioned manners,” Don Carlo comments wryly. 

“They don’t feel particularly old-fashioned to me,” Michael replies. In truth, he loses track of human trends and behaviors. Sometimes it feels like only a few years ago that they were beating rodents to death with rocks for dinner.

“Junior, you see that? That’s how a real man treats a woman,” Don Carlo says, turning to the younger man seated to his right, immediately across the table from Michael.

“Women don’t need men to move chairs around for them, Dad,” the man says with a tight smile. “They got feminism now.” His eyes flick upwards towards Michael. He’s around thirty, and his resemblance to Don Carlo is obvious一attractive, well-built, and sporting an expensive and stylish haircut, where his father’s gaze pierces, this man’s eyes stab. He clearly is not happy to see Michael.

“Sure, we can move our own chairs around, but it’s nice to have someone else do it for you,” Candy cuts in with a smile. 

Don Carlo slaps the table jovially. “Exactly, Miss Fletcher. And forgive my manners—let me introduce my son, Carlo Jr.,” Don Carlo says. “He recently took an interest in the family business, and I’m showing him the ropes. Trying to find something for him to cut his teeth on. Isn’t that right, Junior?”

“Yes it is,” Junior replies, eyes fixed on Michael.

So, this is the competition, Michael thinks. Junior wants to be the head of the family’s Vegas operations. Candy nudges his leg with hers and tilts her head fractionally but pointedly at Junior. Michael nods ever-so-slightly in acknowledgement. They’re on the same page. He suppresses the unpleasant swell of deja vu and focuses on the task at hand.

Waiters descend on the table in unison and begin placing plates of caponata with octopus atop slices of crusty bread in front of each guest and filling their glasses with wine.

Junior stands abruptly as the last plate comes to rest on the table. “Before we eat, a toast,” he announces in a strong, clear voice, picking up his glass of wine. There are the sounds of a few forks and knives coming to rest on plates as some of the more eager dinner guests grudgingly stop to listen.

Junior turns towards his father, raising his glass. “To my father, Don Carlo, for bringing us all here tonight, and for being the founder of this feast. I wish you a long life, happiness, and since we’re in Sin City, good luck at the roulette table! Salut!”

Don Carlo smiles politely at the gathered guests and nods modestly in acknowledgement.

A chorus of “Salut” and “To Don Carlo!” goes up around the table as everyone toasts. Michael drinks, watching his opponent carefully over the lip of his glass. A clear opening volley, but safe, he decides. Scoring a couple of points, but not taking any risks. Seeing how Michael will respond.

Conversation around the table gradually picks up again as guests begin to eat.

“So, Junior,” Michael says, swallowing a mouthful of caponata. “Just getting back into the family business, hm? What were you doing before?”

A flicker of annoyance passes across Carlo Jr.’s face at the nickname, but he forces a smile. “Oh, this and that. I worked in finance for a while.”

“I pay to send him to Harvard Business School, and he spends five years playing with this cryo-currency bullshit,” Don Carlo gripes. 

“It’s cryptocurrency, Dad,” Junior grits out. “And if you’d just invested when I asked you to, we’d have tripled一”

“I told you—I don’t trust what I can’t see.” Don Carlo raises his hands as if to indicate the topic is long-closed, and Junior’s mouth snaps shut.

The boy couldn’t be more textbook, Michael thinks. Prodigal son who tried to make a name for himself out in the big bad world and failed miserably. Slunk back to his father in disgrace when the trust fund ran out. Fears of failure, of inadequacy. 

“Where do you live?” Candy asks, filling an awkward pause.

“Manhattan, in the West Village,” Carlo Jr. replies, smug.

“Oooh!” Candy squeals. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York City. Times Square on New Years Eve,” she sighs dreamily. “So romantic. Have you been?”

“Pah, that’s tourist stuff,” Carlo Jr. replies, clearly warming to the topic. “I could show you the real New York. The party scene—the serious party scene—is crazy. Some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, especially in the VIP rooms. One time, I was with a party that ended up on some emir’s yacht, and when I woke up, we were in international waters. I ended up having to take their helicopter back to the city. The Russians and Saudis are fucking nuts by themselves, and then you throw in some hedge fund guys and tech billionaires and more blow than you’ve ever seen in your life—”

“Junior,” Don Carlo says, a note of warning in his voice.

Carlo Jr. leaves it there, but gives Candy a promising, salacious look before returning his attention to his meal. Michael likes him even less.

The pasta course is some kind of spaghetti with sardines and anchovies that Candy pokes at with no small amount of suspicion before she takes a bite. The extent of her experience with Italian food is lasagna and chicken parm, and the clearly authentic Sicilian food is pushing her outside of her comfort zone. The anxiety of having to perform in a room full of men who have likely either committed or been accessory to a murder also doesn’t do her appetite any favors.

Michael seems to have no such problem, and is tucking into his food with gusto while he makes small talk with Carlo Senior and Junior. She senses he’s fact-finding, largely toying with Junior, biding his time before he finds the right angle from which to make their pitch. 

“So, Vegas,” he says, eventually. “What brings you two here now?”

Don Carlo peers at him shrewdly. “Isn’t it obvious? I wanted to meet the stranger who exposed my rat of a cousin and stepped into his place. I’ve been talking to Vinny for weeks now, trying to wrap my head around it. I spoke to Cousin Mikey every week for years, and even when I mentioned the fact that our Vegas operation was leaking info to the Feds, he never batted an eye. Cool as a fucking cucumber. The man must have had balls of titanium, betraying me like that. And yet according to Vinny, all you had to do was ask him, and the truth came spilling out. How is that?”

Michael shrugs. “It’s just an ability I’ve always had.” He levels a stare at Carlo Jr. “Must be something about this face.”

Candy can’t quite see the expression in Michael’s eyes, but Junior blanches.

Don Carlo raises his glass. “My compliments, then. That’s a very valuable skill in this business.”

“I agree,” Michael replies. “Which is why I’ve chosen to use it in service of your family.”

“Why mine, though? With that skill, you could follow my son’s example, move to New York, and make a killing on Wall Street just as easily, and without signing up for a lifetime of dodging the pigs and watching your back.”

Michael nods, chewing slowly as he considers the question. “That’s true, but there are certain things you can only find here. The desert air, for example, does me good.” He glances lingeringly at Candy.

She looks back at him. His brown eyes are almost black in the dim light, unfathomable as usual. But then the corner of his mouth quirks upwards slightly and the corners of his eyes crinkle, perhaps so subtly that only she can see it. A rare, genuine smile meant only for her. She’s surprised to feel her heart flutter.

“I see,” Don Carlo replies. 

“You’re an idiot, then,” Junior cuts in, through a mouthful of pasta. “No woman is worth losing out on the millions you could make day trading.”

“I’m not interested in getting stranded on a boat in international waters with nothing but a mountain of cocaine, I guess,” Michael replies acerbically. “As fun as that might sound to some people.”

Junior’s cheeks redden, and he risks a glance as his father while he washes down his food with a large swig of wine. “I’m not either, anymore,” he mutters.

Michael turns to see Don Carlo’s reaction, and his spiteful smile fades at what he finds. The older man is watching his son with a kind of helpless, long-suffering affection. He reaches out and touches Junior’s cheek. “And I’m glad to have you back, son.”

Junior clasps his father’s hand against his face in return, patting it. “Thanks, Pops,” he says quietly.

Michael’s expression twists unpleasantly. Candy finds his hand under the table where it’s clenched on his knee and squeezes it. God save her from men and their daddy issues, she thinks. She leans over to put her mouth close to his ear. “He’s not your brother,” she whispers.

“I’m aware,” he breathes almost inaudibly. But his hand does unclench from his knee, and he schools his expression once again into one of bland politeness.

“What are you two whispering about?” Don Carlo asks, eyes piercing once again.

Candy giggles. “Oh, don’t make me say! It’s so embarrassing.”

“Well, now I have to hear it,”

“I just wanted to know whether or not this pasta was gluten-free.”

Junior snorts into his wine glass.

“I was hoping I could discuss a business proposal with you tonight, Don Carlo,” Michael says abruptly, changing the subject. “I think it could represent a major new move for the family and—”

Don Carlo cuts him off with an abrupt gesture. “I don’t talk business at the dinner table. Dinner is about family and friends.”

Michael’s mouth snaps shut, and Junior shoots him a smug look.

The next course consists of some kind of meatballs topped with a delicious tomato sauce. Michael will gladly say one thing for these Italians—their cuisine has improved enormously since the introduction of the tomato to Europe. He thinks back to a visit during the decline of the Roman Empire when it seemed like every food was coated with fermented fish sauce. It took ages to get the flavor out of his mouth after he returned to the Silver City.

The conversation veers away from business as Junior and Don Carlo discuss the declining health of some distant relation of theirs. Michael divides his attention between them and Candy beside him, who’s making conversation with the tired-looking older woman seated beside her while watching the rest of the table with sharp eyes. Her right hand is still resting on his beneath the table and it’s almost all he can think about. Slowly, as if trying not to startle a wild animal, he turns his hand beneath hers so they’re palm-to-palm and curls his fingers around hers. Her hand is tiny and almost unbelievably delicate. She squeezes his fingers and turns to glance at him, sparing a private smile. He watches her face as she laughs at something the woman beside her just said and feels something unfamiliar swell within his chest.

“—isn’t that right, Michael?” Don Carlo is saying.

“Hm?” Michael returns his attention to the mafioso.

“I was just saying, we’re only as strong as the people supporting us,” he repeats.

“Not in my experience,” Michael replies glibly.

Don Carlo’s eyebrows fly upwards. “A self-made man, then?”

“Just one who’s made the mistake of relying on the support of others in the past and regretting it,” Michael says, cutting a meatball in half viciously with the side of his fork. He feels Candy squeeze his hand in warning.

“Everything the Riccis have—everything I have—I owe to the men around this table,” Don Carlo says in a cool, quiet voice that makes conversation around the table dwindle to a halt.

Junior catches Michael’s gaze. He’s smirking viciously from behind the lip of his wine glass.

“And everything we have we owe to you, Don Carlo,” Vinny chimes in deferentially from a few seats away, raising his glass again. There is a murmur of “hear, hear” around the table.

“You mean to tell me that you don’t value that kind of support?” Carlo asks.

Michael realizes belatedly that he’s made a misstep. “Of course I do, Don Carlo. I’ve just never had the pleasure of working with such a group of loyal, trusted, talented”—his mouth twists as he looks at the array of normally murderous human cretins around the table, thinking about them in their typical sweaty, tracksuit-bedecked state—“gentlemen in the past. It’s one of the things that attracted me to this position.”

Don Carlo relaxes back into his chair, smiling, at that. Michael doesn’t flatter himself that he’s actually assuaged the man’s suspicions, though. Candy’s thumb swipes nervously back and forth across the back of his hand.

Dessert is a sampling of delicious, crisp, sweet, creamy cannoli and cups of dark, intense espresso. Candy’s nose and eyes make a last desperate case to her stuffed stomach to try them, and she manages a few regretful bites for the sake of politeness. Michael, whose stomach is seemingly a bottomless pit, makes short work of them.

A few minutes after the desert course comes out of the kitchen, it’s followed by a tiny, wrinkled, ancient-looking woman in an apron who smiles and totters toward Don Carlo. He leaps to his feet and kisses her affectionately. She pinches his cheek and rambles at him in Italian. Don Carlo smiles and puts an arm around her hunched shoulders, turning towards the assembled group.

“And let’s all thank my nonna for the delightful meal she prepared for us!” The table bursts into rapturous applause. “106 years old and still as good a cook as ever!”

Candy’s mouth falls open in shock. “There’s no way she made all of this...for all these people!”

Both Don Carlo and Junior shoot her an affronted look. “You think Nonna can’t cook enough to feed a modest gathering of a couple dozen people?” 

Candy casts a helpless look down the table, where all the Italians stare at her with equal affront.

“I…guess I’m mistaken,” Candy says.

Meanwhile, Don Carlo has pulled up another table to the chair and seated Nonna Ricci on it. She’s so shrunken and hunched that her chin only rises a few inches above the surface of the table. Don Carlo whispers into her ear in Italian, prompting Nonna’s eyes to flare open wide and fix on Candy. She croaks something affronted, gesticulating with both hands. Michael emits an amused snort, and several of the older Italians guffaw.

“She says if you knew anything about food, you’d have finished your cannoli and wouldn’t be as thin as a rail,” Don Carlo translates with a smile.

“Could you tell her I’m sorry to offend her, and I ate too much of all the other delicious courses to be able to fit dessert?” Candy pleads to Don Carlo, suddenly desperate for this tiny Sicilian grandmother’s approval.

Don Carlo begins to translate, but Michael cuts in, speaking in rapid, fluent Italian. “Le dispiace se l'ha offesa, ma ha mangiato troppo dai suoi altri deliziosi piatti e non ha più spazio per il dolce."

Nonna Ricci peers at Michael through rheumy eyes, her stormy expression calming. “È tua moglie?” she asks him.

“No.” 

The old woman shakes her head, tutting disapprovingly and shaking her finger at Michael before launching into another string of impassioned Italian.

“All right, Nonna,” Don Carlo says, putting a hand on her shoulder and cutting her off mid-sentence. “No more matchmaking for now.”

“You speak Italian?” Candy hisses at Michael in disbelief.

“Hm? Oh, yeah,” Michael replies as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary, still clearly thinking through whatever Nonna had been saying.

Nonna’s attention shifts for the time being to Carlo Jr., who receives his own lecture while Candy gamely picks at her cannoli.

Dessert gradually dissolves into a final round of drinks as people begin to meander away from the table. Don Carlo summons an older middle-aged man who’d been seated further down the table to his side, and they retreat to a booth at the far end of the room.

Michael, Candy, Junior, and a few others mill around nearby but out of earshot, like courtiers waiting for an audience with a king.

“When my father talks business, it’s for trusted ears only,” Junior says loudly to Michael, staring pointedly at Candy. “That means no girlfriends with loose lips listening in.”

Candy and Michael planned for this earlier, discussed the likelihood that he’d be expected to discuss the proposal with Don Carlo by himself, and she’s prepared to gracefully excuse herself, but Michael’s arm locks around her waist. “Her lips are as tight as the rest of her, believe me,” he says, with a look that dares Junior to protest further.

Junior huffs, raising both arms in surrender. “Hey, man, it’s your funeral. I certainly wouldn’t trust a piece of ass to speak for me.”

“You see, that surprises me, because it seems like you’re always talking out of your ass,” Michael counters. “Almost like you’re trying to make up for something. So why don’t you tell me, Junior. What is it you truly fear?”

It’s a weird line, Candy thinks. Not the type of thing you’d normally ask someone. But something about it seems to strike terror into Junior as Michael stares into his eyes. He pales and his mouth drops open. “I-I一” he stammers. “I’m afraid I’ll never be truly successful.”

Then it’s like the floodgates open. “In New York, for a while I thought I was one of the elite. I thought my father’s name meant I was hot shit. I was at every party, I dated like six models. But then I kept meeting richer and richer people. They dropped ten grand on dinner. Lost five million in a night of gambling like it was nothing. Rented mansions in the Hamptons that they hardly even used. Kept people on staff just to be organ donors in case of emergency. And who was I? The fuck-up kid of some mobster. Who thought twenty million was enough money to say you were rich. It’s nothing—nothing—to these people. We’re like ants to them. In fifty years, it’s just gonna be them and the cockroaches.”

Michael leans back, a contemplative expression on his face. Junior blinks as if waking up from a dream, or a nightmare. He spares one last baffled look at Michael and then hurries away to wait somewhere else.

“What was that?” Candy breathes.

“Just a little trick,” Michael says dismissively.

It absolutely wasn’t just a trick or a talent—Candy is sure of it—but she drops the subject nonetheless.

“He’s desperate,” Michael continues. “That’s never a good thing.”

“I don’t know if you remember, but we’re desperate too. Or at least I am,” Candy adds with a nervous laugh.

Michael looks down at her, expression inscrutable. “I’ll convince him,” he says. It sounds like a promise.

“Mr. Michael-Just-Michael and Miss Fletcher,” Don Carlo says when they finally settle into the booth across from him. His entire affect is different now. Gone is the jovial father from the dinner and in his place is an ice-cold criminal kingpin.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak with us,” Michael begins.

“I want to say something first in case it’ll save us all a lot of breath,” Don Carlo begins. “As you may have guessed, I came here to set my son up as the head of our Vegas operation. It’s nothing personal, but you’re not family, and frankly, I don’t really trust you.”

“That’s completely reasonable,” Michael concedes. “But before you make your final decision, hear us out. If you’re not interested in our proposal, we’ll each go our own way, no hard feelings.”

Don Carlo leans back into the plush leather booth and gestures for him to continue.

“Illegal business is dying in Vegas,” Michael begins. “You’ve got the clubs, the money lending, a little bit of a drug trade and not much else besides a lot of bribes and expenses eating into your profit margin.”

“Yeah, and this is what makes it perfect for training Junior on,” Don Carlo says with a shrug. “He fucks it all up, I’m not out much cash.”

“But it’d be the end of an era,” Candy pipes up. “Once the Italian mafia leaves Las Vegas, the city will be changed forever. Totally taken over by soulless, sterile corporate mega casinos. Places like this,” Candy gestures at the grandeur of the room around them. “Bulldozed and replaced by hotels with climbing walls and water parks ‘for the kids.’”

“That’s true,” Don Carlo agrees with a nostalgic sigh. “A fuckin’ shame.”

“But what if you had a line of business here that was fully legit, and let you keep all of this?” Michael asks. “Not just keep it, but expand it? Make it more like what it used to be?”

Don Carlo’s eyes narrow and he leans forward slightly. “I’m listening.”

Candy picks up effortlessly from where Michael left off, her enthusiasm for the pitch making her forget for a moment that she’s supposed to be mindless arm candy tonight. “Imagine a hotel-casino frozen in time in 1948. Before the MGM Grand, before the Bellagio, before the scale model of the Eiffel Tower turned everything into a cartoon. Back when men wore hats and women wore dresses and people cared about manners. When the mafia was something deserving of fear and respect. You’re not the only one who wants that. Every person who walks through the doors of this club is looking for a taste of that experience, of authenticity.”

Michael continues. “This is the future of Las Vegas. Not more slot machines or more aging pop stars in residence. People come here to get something they can’t get anywhere else. A taste of the kind of glamor and danger that the rest of the world has sanitized and corporatized and repackaged as family-friendly. So we’ll give them a hotel run by real mafia, where everyone dresses and behaves like it’s the golden age. Food, drinks, and entertainment are all period-appropriate. Antique slot machines and table games. No TVs, no annoying digital noises, no money stored on key cards. This is the kind of entertainment the younger crowd is craving. Compared to what you’re making from loan interest and some rink-a-dink party drug operation, the ceiling on this business is sky-high,” Michael concludes. “And we have the vision and business plan for it.”

Don Carlo swirls the amber liquid in a tumbler of whiskey thoughtfully. “It’s an interesting pitch. Very interesting,” he muses. “But my concern still stands. My guys here fear you, sure. You can get a long way with fear alone, but it’s not enough to run a business. You need a bond. Respect.”

Michael looks pointedly at Junior, who’s perched on the edge of the table across the room, face illuminated by the screen of his phone as he swipes at it aimlessly. The other mobsters are clearly avoiding him, casting him resentful glances occasionally over their shoulders as they talk quietly in small groups. “Do you think he’ll have their respect? That your family will even survive another generation with only him to lead it?”

Don Carlo’s impassive expression cracks for a moment, betraying the tiniest bit of uncertainty and anxiety before the mask slams back into place. “That’s for me to decide.” He sits back in his booth and raises a hand in dismissal.

Michael and Candy get to their feet. “Thank you for agreeing to hear us out,” Candy says.

Don Carlo extends his hand for Michael to shake and gives him a final, lingering stare. “It was good to finally meet you. And you, Miss Fletcher, contain unexpected depths.”

Candy gives him a shrewd smile and takes his hand in turn. “I find that most women do.”

Don Carlo laughs. “True enough!”

Emerging into the cool night air is like coming up from under water. Michael forces himself to relax out of the rigidly straight posture he held himself in all night, bolts of pain shooting from his bad shoulder but easing now as he favors it again. Candy takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, tapping out a message on her phone to summon their driver. For now, they’re alone on the sidewalk.

“So what do you think?” she asks quietly, wary of the occasional dinner guest exiting the club behind them. “Did we sell him?”

Michael sighs thoughtfully, staring at the flashing lights of the Strip a few blocks away. “You know…” he turns to look at her, a sly smile on his face. “I think we did.”

Candy emits a half-suppressed squeal of victory behind her grin, bouncing on her toes and shaking both fists. “I’m so glad you think so too. It was touch and go there until the end. You thinking to bring up his son was just—you were so—”

And suddenly she’s in his arms, her mouth soft and sweet against his. He barely wastes a moment on shock or hesitation, immediately wrapping his arms around her, holding her close, and responding in kind as she kisses him enthusiastically. They’re both breathless when she finally pulls back, and he rests her gently down onto her feet. She doesn’t back away this time, though. She stays in his space, sharing breath and staring into his eyes.

“I think our ride is here,” she whispers.

“We should get in,” he replies.

He kisses her again, watching as her eyes fall closed, eating up every little sound she makes, feeling every inch of her body against his as he walks her slowly towards the sleek black car pulled up to the curb next to him.

There are wolf whistles and suggestive laughter as another group of dinner guests exit the club behind them, but Michael can’t bring himself to care as they separate long enough to climb into the back seat of the car. The driver shuts the door behind them, and the car pulls away.

Unbeknownst to them, hidden against the wall in the shadows cast by the club’s entryway, the blue glow of a vape pen illuminates the face of Carlo Ricci Jr.

Chapter Text

They are a confusion of hands and mouths and shared breath in the backseat of the hired limo. Candy fumbles for the button to put up the partition separating them from the driver while simultaneously enjoying the sounds Michael makes when she puts her tongue in his ear. Once the telltale soft whirr of the motor raising the pane of tinted glass stops, she swings one leg over Michael’s lap and straddles him, aware but unconcerned that it causes her mini dress to ride up to her hips.

“You were so hot tonight,” she breathes in his ear, sliding her hands under his jacket and working on untucking his shirt.

“Likewise,” he murmurs, chasing her mouth like a hunting dog on a scent, hands roving uncertainly along her back before settling on her ass.

Candy manages to get his shirt fully untucked and presses her hands against the taut flesh of his belly, manicured fingertips teasing just below the waist of his trousers. She glances down at his lap and finds a telltale bulge, and is unable to resist the urge to touch it.

All the breath goes out of him in a rush against her neck, where he’d been kissing down the line of her throat. For a man who’s so unaffected and cold-blooded in the tensest and most dangerous scenarios, he’s remarkably responsive. It’s thrilling to have a man like that so under her thrall.

An idea strikes her, and she slides backwards off his lap to kneel in the footwell in front of him, her hands stroking up and down the tense muscles of his thighs. He gazes down at her with hooded eyes, lips kiss-swollen and parted slightly, chest heaving with labored breaths. 

Like this, out of the shell of his habitual turtleneck and oversized jacket, long neck exposed and undeniably beautiful, he could almost be mistaken for his brother. Yet there’s still something intrinsically ‘Michael’ about him, maybe in the uneasy way he wears his desire. Lucifer exalts in it, with his salacious grins and easy seduction. Michael is overcome by it, like it’s something wild and strange he doesn’t know how to control, his hands trembling as they rest uncertainly on her shoulders.

“We’re going to be two of the most powerful people in Las Vegas,” Candy says with a grin.

Michael laughs, breathless. “Well, it’s a step below Ruler of the Universe, but it’s something.”

“You say the weirdest shit sometimes.” She shakes her head and unzips his fly, reaching in to pull his erection free without much ceremony. Michael gasps, eyes wide, but when she starts to lean in to put her mouth on him, he holds her back.

“You—you’re planning to do that…here?” he stammers, eyes cutting up pointedly towards the raised partition between them and the driver.

Candy shrugs. “It was good enough for Beyoncé.”

His brows contract and he blinks at her, baffled. “I don’t understand you.”

“Good, I like to remain mysterious.” She smiles seductively and lowers her mouth to the head of his cock, which clearly does not share its owner’s qualms about their location. 

Michael goes tense as she goes to work, teeth clenched and eyes flicking between her and some speck of dust on the ceiling of the car, hands sweating where they now clamp in a death grip on her shoulders. If the very idea weren’t ridiculous for a man his age, who looked like him, with his sex drive, she’d almost think he’d never gotten blown before.

She pulls off of him to take a breath, stroking his hot, hard length absently, her free hand wandering between her legs to soothe the growing ache there.

“Michael,” she says. He shakes himself as if waking from a dream and finally looks at her, panting, a lost expression on his face. “Could you pull my hair?” His cock twitches abruptly in her hand.

“Uh, yeah,” he says in a strangled voice. He sinks one large hand into the hair at the back of her skull, fingertips grazing her scalp gently before grasping a handful of hair and twisting it in his fist. His other hand comes up to cup her cheek, thumb swiping reverently across her swollen lips. He gives her hair a gentle, experimental tug.

Candy smiles. “A little harder.” This time, he pulls hard enough that it jerks her head back. Candy’s eyes fall shut, and her hand quickens between her legs. “Just like that,” she gasps, and then sets to work on his cock again.

She lets his hand in her hair guide her, this time. He’s still a little tentative, but she finds that if she moans her approval whenever he does something she likes, he’s quick to learn. As he gets close, the hand in her hair kneads restlessly, readjusting his grip, his blunt fingernails scraping against her scalp. When he comes, his hips rise up off the leather of the seat. He emits a choked cry, head falling back and chest heaving.

Candy swallows and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand before tucking Michael back into his pants, zipping him up, and returning to her spot on the seat beside him.

His head is still thrown back onto the headrest, and he’s ragdoll-limp, blinking drowsily up at the ceiling. “That was amazing,” he says, sounding surprised.

Candy smirks and glances out the window. “Oh, we’re almost here.”

Michael rouses a little, lifting his head to follow her gaze. The car pulls smoothly to the curb outside of her apartment building. Candy tugs her skirt down primly as she waits for the driver to open her door, then climbs out. She turns back to look inside the car when she realizes she’s alone on the sidewalk. Michael is still sitting inside the car, with an uncertain deer-in-the-headlights look on his face.

Candy raises her eyebrows. “Well, come on.”

Michael scrambles to follow her, unfolding himself from the car and stopping when he sees the driver standing there expectantly, hands folded politely in front of him. Michael grumbles and reaches into his jacket to pull out a wad of cash, counting out bills carefully. The driver watches him count with growing skepticism, and continues to stand there after Michael thrusts the cash into his hand.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Candy huffs, snatching the wad of cash from Michael’s hand, counting out several more bills, and giving them to the driver with an apologetic smile. The driver tips his hat to her with a gracious “ma’am” and spares Michael a cool look before getting back into the car and pulling away into the late-night traffic. 

She gives Michael a chastising look. “Look, I don’t know if you guys were raised in Europe or something, but you can’t just not ti一”

He cuts her off with a kiss, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her against him. She moans into his mouth, his ardor enough to make her forget about his chronic cheapness. For now.

They make out in the elevator car as it carries them up to Candy’s floor, and against the door to her apartment, and some more after they stumble inside, her keys jangling discordantly as they strike the edge of the bowl where she keeps them and tumble, forgotten, to the floor.

Michael takes in his surroundings only in flashes, his normally observant eyes blinded by lust. Was it only last night that they were here watching that damned movie? That she fell asleep on the sofa beside him? He finds that it doesn’t matter, that he doesn’t care, not when her mouth and hands are on him, wanting him.

Candy finally pulls away from him, and he realizes they’re in her bedroom. No hasty coupling on the floor with most of their clothes on this time, he thinks, dazed. She pauses to kick off her shoes, one hand on his shoulder for balance as she abruptly gets inches shorter. After a moment of staring at her dumbly, he mirrors her, toeing off his “fashionable” new Italian torture devices with a wince.

“Not comfortable?” she asks, smiling. 

“I think you know perfectly well that none of this monkey suit has anything to do with comfort.” 

Her eyes soften, and she reaches up to his shoulders again. She pushes the expensive blazer they spent so long negotiating over off his shoulders, taking care to ease it gently past his bad arm. Something in his chest throbs dully as he watches her. She lays the jacket over the back of a floral-patterned wingback chair in the corner before returning to him. 

Her eyes are on him as she draws near again, dark and inscrutable, and he’s suddenly self-conscious. He draws himself up straight, wishing he cut an attractive figure like his twin. Wishing he could be relaxed and graceful and easy. The effort is agony, especially after an entire evening of holding himself this way. Pain shoots in white-hot bolts from the raw skin on his back to the tips of his twitching fingers.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Candy murmurs, resting a hand on his arm. “This is about feeling good. Just do what’s comfortable for you.”

Michael blinks at her as he lets his shoulders return to their normal angle again, mouth opening and closing a few times as he struggles to find words before blurting out, “I want to go down on you.” 

He feels his face heat. It’s something he’s thought about ever since they first had sex, something his “research” into pornography has made clear is one of the cornerstones of sexual ability. And since she sucked him off in the car earlier, the idea of reciprocating has been at the front of his mind. But now that he’s said it, he’s suddenly aware that he doesn’t know more than the vaguest details about how to go about it.

Candy laughs, either at his abrupt delivery or the anxiety on his face. “Well, you’re not going to get any arguments from me.”

He stands rooted to the spot, staring, as she shimmies out of her tight dress and sits on the end of her bed. There’s so much of her to take in, every inch of flushed peachy skin calling out for his attention. He goes to his knees before her. It’s a natural position for him, after so many years at Father’s right hand, after bending the knee to Lucifer. But he feels no bitterness here, no resentment. After all, she was willing to do the same for him. He slides his hands up the silky smoothness of her legs. She’s all softness, but he can feel the strength of her muscles just beneath the surface. Her hidden steel core under a coating of candyfloss.

He leans in to press his face against the pink lace between her legs, breathing in the scent of her and pressing open-mouthed kisses to the delicate skin of her inner thighs. He’ll never cease to be baffled as to why Father made angels like this, just as vulnerable to humanity’s carnal pleasures as humans themselves, but for the moment he can’t find it in himself to be upset by it. He hooks his fingers in the waistband of her panties and draws them slowly down her legs.

Michael stares at her for a long moment—all glistening pink flesh and carefully trimmed hair—and then she spreads her legs pointedly, and he’s moving all at once, without thought, opening his mouth to kiss her there. It’s not the most pleasant thing he’s ever tasted, but there’s something compelling about it, something intoxicating. It makes his mouth water and his renewed erection ache, urges his hips to drive forward.

She mewls, hand going to the back of his head, and he knows with sudden certainty that he’ll do anything to produce that sound again.

Michael soon realizes that it’s not exactly a complex art, or at least with Candy it isn’t. All he needs to do is figure out what movements of his lips and tongue and fingers make her sigh or moan or whimper and repeat them over and over. He lets his mind quiet, focusing only on the task at hand, on the sensation of her hand gripping his hair, her hips grinding restlessly against his face.

He spent his long life denying himself pleasure. It was his twin’s domain, after all. Aside from the bitter glee he got from manipulating his siblings or drawing the fears out of mortals, he lived a fairly ascetic life in the Silver City. He believed so fully, for so long, that if he was the obedient son, the diligent son, the one who did all the thankless work that running Father’s kingdom required, he would eventually be rewarded. And now that that illusion has been so thoroughly destroyed, he finds that he no longer has any interest in self-denial. If Lucifer is going to be God, if the universe has been turned so fully on its head, then why shouldn’t the most faithful of Father’s angels wallow in earthly sin?

When he comes upon a particular approach that makes her whine and fall backwards onto the bed, legs wrapping around his shoulders, he finds himself grinning with something a bit like delight. He works at her relentlessly until her back arches and she cries his name, the surge of pride he feels muting the pain of one of her heels digging into the open wound where his left wing used to be through his shirt. 

He laps slowly at her as she relaxes by increments. She releases the death grip she had on his hair and lets her arms flop onto the bed on either side of her, sighing.

“That was nice,” she says dreamily. “Did you even breathe?”

“Not much,” he admits. Honestly, he hadn’t even thought about it.

“Come here,” she says, patting the bed beside her. He responds eagerly, crawling up beside her as she wriggles backward until her head hits the pillows. She glances in surprise at his crotch. “Already reporting for duty again, huh?”

He hums absently in agreement, running one hand up her belly to massage her pert breasts. She laughs again and props herself up on her elbow so she can start unbuttoning his shirt. He’s never really thought much about his body, except for its cursed similarity to Lucifer’s and as a source of near-constant discomfort, but as Candy’s eyes fix on his exposed skin and her hands begin to trace the muscles of his chest, he realizes that he can be an object of desire, too. Even when he’s not pretending to be Lucifer.

He sits up enough to peel off his shirt and then returns to her. His arms, too, are apparently a source of fascination to her. It’s somehow different from the chatter about his ass from the airheaded dancers at Fletcher’s. To be wanted and admired in kind by someone who he wants and admires.

He kisses her. She makes a scrunched up face at the taste of herself on his mouth. It’s utterly unsexy and yet he finds it entirely endearing. 

“Somehow it’s never gross eating another girl out, but when it’s my own pussy I’m tasting…” she says.

Michael chuckles and kisses her again, rolling her over onto her back. Her hands grip the curve of his backside and he presses his crotch against her thigh, grinding in a way that feels amazing and yet is still not enough. He manages to negotiate one hand between their bodies, reaching for the fastening on his trousers, and is so focused on removing them without having to stop kissing her that he barely notices her hands begin to skim up his back.

When they come across his burns, however, it becomes very clear. He flinches at the unexpected sting, and she gasps, pulling away from him. 

“Sorry—I’m sorry!” She stammers, wide-eyed. “I completely forgot!”

“It’s fine,” he says quickly, reaching for her again, but she draws further away.

“I’m—god, I’m so stupid. I should have asked if you were okay first. Let me look.”

“No, wait—you don’t have to一” 

But she’s already scooting out from under him and urging him onto his stomach so she can examine him. He tenses, feeling his erection rapidly waning, as she looks at him like a crippled bird. Pitying.

“Jesus,” she breathes. He stares fixedly at the fabric of the pillow his face is pressed into, humiliated. “This hasn’t gotten any better since we went shopping. I thought at least it would have scabbed over or一”

“I said, it’s fine,” he repeats coldly, shrugging off her touch and sitting up.

“What even happened to you?” she asks gently.

“I would rather not talk about it.”

“You said before it was your punishment? What does that mean?”

“Just leave it, will you!” he snaps, voice raised and power flaring as he finally looks her in the eyes again. He regrets it immediately. Her eyes are wide, and she’s gone pale with fear. That throbbing, growing, tender thing in his chest lurches unpleasantly. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, getting up from the bed and bending to pick up his shirt. “I’ll go.”

She stares at him, curled in on herself protectively. He bends to collect his shoes and jacket, and averts his eyes as he walks out of the room, limbs leaden.

Michael pauses once he’s in the living room to put his shoes on, perching on the edge of a chair and forcing his feet into the uncomfortable leather prisons with ruthless, self-loathing satisfaction. He doesn’t notice the sound of bare feet padding across the carpet until Candy is standing only a few feet away, wrapped in a fluffy, pale blue bathrobe, her arms folded protectively in front of her.

“You really should go to the hospital,” she says quietly. “There’s no way those won’t get infected.”

“They won’t get infected,” he mumbles.

“I wish you’d just tell me whatever the big secret is. I hoped that after all this, you’d trust me enough.”

“What big secret?” He plays dumb unconvincingly, even to his ears.

“You and Lucifer and your mysterious burns. Whatever business your family is involved in. What the deal with your weird hypnotism thing is. The Big Secret. I’m not an idiot, you know. I know people, and I can tell when they’re hiding something from me.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he replies, finishing tying his shoes with a vicious jerk of the laces.

“Try me,” she says. Then, more quietly, “Trust me.”

His eyes dart up to regard her. She’s lit only by the indirect, unnatural lights of the city outside and haloed by the glow of the open bedroom door behind her. She’s the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen. He knows with certainty that if he tells her the truth, she’ll think he’s insane. She will never want him again.

“I can’t—“ he says harshly, almost pleading, barely trusting his voice. “Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?” she asks.

He nods mutely, avoiding her eyes as he stands, folding his jacket over his arm. He brushes past her on his way to the door and she catches his arm. He should be able to break away easily, to shrug off her weak human grip, but he’s bound by her as surely as if by hell-forged chains.

“I’ll see you at work, too?” She asks, a note of desperation in her voice. “We have big plans, right? Lots to do.”

He glances at her big, gentle brown eyes and nods shortly. It seems to be enough for her. She releases him, and he flees into the night.

Chapter Text

Candy is plagued with second thoughts the whole next day. Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed. Should have just ignored the scars. His cryptic statements about his past. The way he could strike terror into people on a whim. 

Half of her exes said she tried to make relationships move too fast. The other half said she was terrified of commitment. All she knows is that she’s never managed a half-way healthy long-term relationship in her life. After Allie, she had almost  resigned herself to the idea of being alone forever. The club was all the spouse she’d ever need. Which, incidentally, was also a criticism levied against her by more than one ex.

And maybe at first, Michael had just been a rebound, but despite herself, she’d started to like the bastard. He was funny, blunt, smart—maybe a little bit of a dick—but everyone had rough edges. He wore power and control like he was born into it, like a prince who had fallen on hard times. And most importantly, he made her feel wanted, protected. Like she was something special. As if he liked her more than anyone else on the planet.

Not to mention the fact that he gave head like an overweight sorority sister on her first spring break trip—enthusiastic, eager to please, and grateful. And Candy can say that from experience.

She sighs, sitting at the bar, looking over the inventory as the staff files in for the night, and gnawing on the cap of her pen. She tells herself she’s not watching for him, but she’s definitely watching for him. He usually gets here well before opening, so he can help Natalie with any miscellaneous tasks, or make snarky, teasing comments as he balances her books.

Eventually, it gets too late, and she has to hurry to her dressing room to get ready in time for the show. When she peeks out from behind the backstage curtain during the dancers’ first number, she sees him standing dutifully at the door, face impassive, and lets out a sigh of relief. At least he didn’t run. That would have done absolutely nothing for her persistent fear of abandonment.

She watches him as she sings old big band and Broadway standards. Watches him as she sings bluesy love songs. Watches even when she’s not onstage. She doesn’t think he looks towards her once. But there’s a parade of the who’s who of the Vegas organized crime scene through the club’s doors tonight. They come, one after another, to pay obeisance to him. Despite their confrontation last night, it still makes her feel a surge of pride. This is their accomplishment, after all.

When the last customer finally stumbles out, she thinks she’s ready to talk with him. She feels confident. Ready to forgive any youthful mistakes. She’s even willing to pardon some light felonies. After all they’ve achieved so far, what could possibly stop them now?

Michael’s waiting for her in the club after she changes out of her costume and all the other staff has trickled out for the night, sitting at the two-top near the bar where she interviews job applicants, his hands clasped before him on the tabletop. She rounds the table and gets a good look at his face. He seems haggard, like he hasn’t slept, his stubble a little long. His eyes are fixed on the middle-distance in front of him and his jaw is set in resignation, like a man facing a firing squad.

“I need a drink. Do you want a drink?” she asks anxiously, pivoting to step behind the bar and root around among the bottles, looking for nothing in particular. Stalling, she realizes.

She picks something at random and pours two fingers of it into two tumblers. When she rounds the bar again, tumblers in hand, he’s staring at her with a strange, melancholy expression on his face.

“It was fun, right?” he asks. “These past few weeks.”

“Jesus, Michael, stop acting like I’m going to behead you,” she jokes nervously, setting the drinks down on the table and sitting opposite him. “I just want to, you know, know who I’m getting in bed with.”

He sighs, toying with the glass in front of him. “That’s reasonable.”

“Great. So, listen—no judgement. All my cards on the table: I’ve stolen from my customers, done unsavory things for less savory people. I stripped, and I even escorted for a while when times were rough.” She chuckles bitterly. “I’m not exactly an angel.”

He barks a laugh at that, abrupt and mirthless. She shoots him a startled glance. “Did I say something funny?” she asks, genuinely confused.

“No, the joke is—as usual—on me.”

“So?” she prompts.

“So?”

“I laid my cards on the table. All my skeletons are out of the closet. It feels good, believe me.”

He snorts. “Cards on the table, huh?”

“It is Vegas, after all.”

He sighs, looks down at his drink for a long moment, and then lifts it, downing it all in one swig. When he sets the glass down again, his expression is cool and impassive. It sends a chill down her spine.

“Well, how’s this to start? I killed three people, more or less, and my sister, too.”

Candy is struck speechless, barely comprehending his words. Her mind can’t reconcile the sour, surly, and often incongruously protective man she’s grown fond of over the past month with the image of a man who’d kill his own sibling. 

“Why?” she asks finally, in a small voice.

Michael’s face contorts in a tangled mess of emotion that resolves into a bitter smile. “You’re looking for a reasonable explanation? Do you want me to say it was self-defense? I did it because it suited me,” he sneers. “Because they were in my way. ”

Candy recoils. “But…there has to be a reason why,” she insists. It doesn’t make any sense otherwise. There’s no way she could have misjudged his character so completely. Not again.

“I wanted to succeed my father. I thought I deserved to succeed him. I would have done anything for it. Removed anyone who stood against me. Killed my own twin if I could have managed it.”

“What job could possibly be worth that?” she asks, aghast.

He laughs harshly. “Why, God, of course. Though I’ve come to believe that I didn’t really want to become God as much as I just didn’t want my brother to. I thought, maybe just this once, I could be the one who won. Shows you how clever I am.”

She stares, perplexed, until he continues, gesticulating as he rants, becoming increasingly incensed. “Don’t you see, Candy? I’m an archangel. Immortal. Far above the concerns of petty mortals like yourself. Or I was, until my fool of a twin hacked off my wings. He claims it was mercy to spare my life, but I think he was just embracing his new title. Ruler of the Universe. King of Heaven and Hell. He sent me here, to this earthly Perdition, to torture me with a hint of something good, and then snatch it away.” Michael gestures at her. 

“That’s crazy,” she whispers.

He seems grimly satisfied at that, to see his prediction of how she would react proven accurate.

“I would prove it to you, but一” He gestures impotently at his back.

“You need help, Michael,” she says gently. “This is a delusion. It’s all in your head. You’re not an angel, you’re just a man.”

He shakes his head desolately, until an idea seems to strike him suddenly. “You know what? I can prove it! And I will!” He leaps up from the table suddenly, prompting her to jump back in alarm, and strides around the bar in a few rapid steps. He ducks below the bar and begins to rummage around loudly, shoving glasses aside and clanking silverware.

She gets to her feet and cautiously approaches the other side of the bar to try to see what he’s doing.

“Aha!” he shouts suddenly, popping back up, brandishing a small utility knife. She reels back in surprise, warning bells sounding in her head. A mentally unstable man with a knife. Bad news, bad news, bad news…

She holds her hands up in a conciliatory gesture, backing up carefully. “Michael, listen…”

“Watch this!” he says, grinning, eyes wide and desperate. He flips the knife in his grip so the blade is pointing down, slaps his other hand onto the bar, and without so much as a moment’s hesitation, stabs the blade down through his hand, pinning it to the polished walnut. 

She shrieks in shock, hands coming up to cover her mouth. He releases the knife and stares the handle dumbly for a long second as it wobbles, and then at the blood that swells around the cut and begins to drip down the back of his hand in a steady stream. And then he starts to laugh, a hysterical giggle that she tries hard to ignore as she springs into action, scrambling for a clean bar rag to staunch the bleeding with.

“Of course,” he gasps after the first wave of giggles abates. “Of course it happens to me now . That’s just my luck. ‘Watch this,’” he mimics, and pantomimes stabbing himself again. “ Thunk! I’m such a fucking idiot. ” He’s taken by helpless peals of laughter again, but as he laughs, he peremptorily grabs the handle of the knife again and pulls it out of the wood and his hand without any apparent effort.

“Fuck,” she curses, grabbing his hand, which is now bleeding freely, and wrapping it in the bar rag. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to take it out.”

 “Sorry,” he says as his laughter finally dies out, though his voice still holds a note of mania. “I’ve never needed first aid before.”

“Because you’re an angel, right?” she asks sarcastically. “Here, apply pressure to this.” She passes his hand back to him and reaches into her pocket to pull out her phone. She considers calling 911, but appraises him, slumped sadly against the bar, his face grim again, but in a mopey way rather than a dying of blood loss way. Instead, she googles “stab wound first aid” and briefly scans the list of steps that comes up.

“Okay, we need to wash it,” she says, trying to sound more confident than she feels. In truth, according to the list, she was supposed to wash her hands before touching it at all, and she’d bet good money that the bar rag wasn’t sterile. “Follow me.”

Michael trails her morosely into the women’s restroom and leans his hip against the counter as she runs the faucet in one of the sinks, waiting for it to warm up.  When it’s good and hot, she gently takes his injured hand and peels off the rag, which is already half-soaked with blood. She lowers his blood-encrusted palm under the stream and watches as the crusted blood rinses away, revealing an angry puncture wound that pulses fresh blood in a thin stream.

“Are you sure you’re not Jesus?” she jokes half-heartedly. “You’ve got the stigmata already.”

“Don’t get me started on him,” he mutters, eyes fixed on where their hands touch as she carefully rinses both sides of the wound and reaches for the soap dispenser. He doesn’t even hiss as she pumps soap onto the wound and starts lathering it.

“My sister’s name was Remiel,” he says softly, and she freezes for a moment. She’d been happy to let her panic shove aside thoughts about his troubling confessions and wild claims, but he seems insistent on telling her about them, now that the floodgates have opened and all the crazy is spilling out. “She always hated me, ever since we were young. She hated Lucifer, too, for that matter. Constitutionally incapable of seeing any color besides black and white. To her, fear was the same thing as cowardice. And she felt cowardice was worse than anything.”

He glances up at himself in the mirror, and then immediately looks away, eyes locking onto the paper towel dispenser across the room. Candy avoids looking him in the face too, not ready to deal with the unfamiliar, wild, raw expression there, focusing instead on returning his hand to the running water and rinsing off the soap. She feels wrong-footed, like she’s perched unsteadily on the precipice of something she’s not sure she wants to fall into.

“She thought she was better than me. So superior. ‘Cowardly scum,’ she called me. Thought it was unsporting for me to arm myself with what I needed to win. Thought she was faster than me. Tried to disarm me.” He chuckles bleakly. “I showed her.”

Candy shuts off the tap with a violent slam of her palm that makes Michael start. His brief silence is a respite that she’s grateful for as she gathers a stack of paper towels from the dispenser and thrusts them at him. “Keep pressure on it,” she says shortly. 

He obligingly grips his injured palm with a clump of paper towels and perches on the edge of the countertop. She dries her own hands, the silence weighing heavily on her for several seconds before risking a glance up at him again. He’s watching her with an inscrutable expression, a poker face that would be the envy of any professional gambler. She wishes he’d go back to ranting, or laughing hysterically. It would be much easier to dismiss everything he was saying as the ravings of a madman.

“What about the other three people?” she prompts quietly.

“Oh, just humans,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching in what might be a wince. “Some greedy fence named TJ, Dan Espinoza, and that poor miracle, Chloe Decker.”

Candy blinks, shaking her head. “No. You didn’t kill Chloe. Lucifer mentioned they were dating when he visited last week.”

He sneers. “Oh yes, Lucifer sacrificed himself to resurrect her. Very noble. It’s what ended up getting him the coveted job in the end. Something that selfish, conniving Michael would never do.”

Candy sighs, looking up at the water stain in the corner of the ceiling for strength. “You can’t—it’s not fair to say shit like this to me and expect me to take you seriously.”

“I don’t expect you to take me seriously. I expect you to kick me to the curb and tell me you never want to see me again. It’s what someone half as intelligent and pragmatic as you would do. Hell, it’s what I would do in your shoes. But you wanted the truth.” His voice softens as he looks down at his own ugly brown shoes. “And I owed you that much.”

She feels a lump rise in her throat, the perfect match to the cold weight in the pit of her stomach. Yesterday, she felt so good. Everything was so right. And he—he felt like a partner in crime, a confidant, someone who understood her, who wanted her as she was. Now she’s not sure whether to trust anything he says.

Candy puts her hand on his uninjured one where it still clasps paper towels to his wound. She steels herself and finally meets his eyes again. They’re clear and lucid and closer than she expects them to be. “You—you know you can get help, right? I can help you find a really good therapist, and—and with all the money you’re making, it wouldn’t even be a problem to一”

There’s a sound like something metallic falling loudly somewhere in the club, and they both turn towards the bathroom door, but no more noises follow.

“What was that?” Michael wonders.

“I don’t know,” Candy murmurs. “Listen, can we talk about this later? We really should get you to the hospital. You’re going to need stitches and some actual disinfection. And一”

It’s then that the smoke alarm goes off, and all hell breaks loose.

Candy rushes out of the bathroom as fast as her heels will take her. The lone smoke detector is in the hallway outside of her office. Not even remotely up to code, but she’d done a favor or two for the building inspector and managed to walk away with a steeply reduced fine. Really, the club needed a fire suppression system, but when had she ever had the money to install that?

The back hallway is filled with a thin haze, and she comes to a halt for a moment, turning this way and that to try and figure out where it’s coming from. Michael nearly collides with her, and grabs her shoulders to steady them both.

Suddenly, Candy hears a tear and a crash to her left and the crackle of flames. “The stage,” she gasps, panicked, and takes off at a sprint.

The smoke is much worse inside of the club proper. Somehow, the curtains have caught fire and are rapidly being consumed as flames lick upwards towards the rafters. Candy vaults the bar and roots around the shelves below until she manages to locate the aged fire extinguisher, crusted in dust and grime.

“What are you doing?” Michael shouts over the growing roar of the fire. “We need to get the fuck out of here!”

“This club is my life!” Candy shouts back, running towards the stage and fumbling at the mechanism on the extinguisher for a moment before managing to shoot it, spraying at the blazing curtains. She manages to put out a small portion, but meanwhile the fire has spread to twice, three times as big an area. A panel of plywood supporting the set teeters and falls behind them, colliding with the bar in a cacophony of shattering glass.

“Shit!” Michael shouts, and then he moves, faster than she can keep track of, pushing her down and throwing himself over her just as some flammable liquor catches fire and explodes, showering them in a rain of glass.

Candy peeks around Michael to see that the explosion has spread the fire between them and the front door, catching on the walls and several tables and chairs. The floor itself is burning with all the spilled alcohol.

“Yeah,” Candy says, nodding rapidly, her terror and self-preservation finally overriding her hope. “We need to get the fuck out of here. Let’s go out the back.”

Michael stands, grimacing, and tows her behind him as they make their way down the back hallway, past the dressing room filled with a dozen gowns that she treasures more than any other earthly possessions, past the office that still reminds her of her father every time she cracks open his ancient ledger, to the creaky metal emergency exit at the back of the building. Michael hits the push bar with all his weight, and then bounces back. He stares at the door, baffled, and pushes on the bar again.

“Is it stuck?” Candy asks, coughing as the smoke thickens.

“I dunno, it’s—it’s not fucking moving.” Michael takes two steps back and rushes forward again, ramming his shoulder into the door. It still doesn’t budge, but he winces and grasps his shoulder in pain. He screams in frustration, winds up, and punches the door with all his strength. To her amazement, the steel door dents . She looks back at him to see him clutching his hand, which is now also bleeding profusely.

“We need to go out the front,” she shouts.

He wavers for a minute, turning to regard the growing orange glow behind them and then the stubborn door in front of them, and then nods, grabbing her hand. Candy winces. She can feel the bones in his freshly injured hand grinding around, broken.

But when they return to the club proper, she has bigger things to worry about. The fire has continued to spread, and the heat of it is like a physical blow. Every breath she takes sears her lungs. The path to the front door is so filled with smoke and flame that she can barely make it out. Michael shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around her.

She sees him mouth “cover yourself,” but can’t hear him over the roar. They pick their way towards the exit in a stuttering sprint, pausing as debris falls around them. Increasingly large chunks of burning wood fall from the ceiling, the very bones of the building that she lied and stole and whored herself to save. A club people had murdered for. All gone in minutes.

She’s not sure if she’s crying as she runs for her life. If she is, the tears are probably evaporating as soon as they fall.

“Almost there,” Michael screams in her ear.

Suddenly, there’s a deafening crack above them, and they both look up in unison to see one of the great wooden beams that support the roof snap and start to fall. 

She’s being propelled forward before she knows what’s happening, some powerful force flinging her towards the door. She collides with the entrance heavily and looks back to catch the sight of Michael’s pale, terrified face staring back at her before the beam comes down on top of him, shrouding him in the all-consuming inferno.

Chapter Text

When he was young, and the universe was new, Michael had the most terrible dreams. 

He dreamt of stars collapsing, creating black tears in reality that drew everything around them into crushing oblivion. He dreamt of warmth dissipating into the cold emptiness of a void, of light fading into darkness. Of beings dying in pain and confusion. Of chaos, of destruction.

And above all, he dreamt of being alone. Of being the only thing living in a dead, empty universe. Trying to satiate his gnawing, endless hunger for something else by consuming himself. Until there was nothing, nothing, nothing一

He would wake with a jolt, mouth stretched open in a scream, limbs struggling against his twisted bedding, wild-eyed as he took in the quarters where he and Samael slept. His brother, of course, was splayed casually across his bed, a vision of carefree rest. But now his brows contracted in mild annoyance as he roused, eyes cracking open to regard his twin. 

“What’s the matter? I was having the most lovely dream,” Samael mumbled. “Stars being born, creatures growing and transforming in the strangest, most delightful ways…”

“I-I—it was,” Michael began, not sure how he could possibly describe the terrible things he saw, the way he felt. His heart was still pounding. “I was alone,” he said eventually.

“You’re not alone,” Samael replied dismissively, readjusting his pillow to get more comfortable and closing his eyes again. “You have Father and Mother and all of us.”

“I know that,” Michael said, frustrated tears prickling at his eyes. “But in the dream一”

“Go back to sleep,” Samael yawned. “Maybe if you don’t worry about it, you’ll dream of nicer things.”

But he didn’t. Instead, the dreams plagued him night after night, until he took to staying awake, trying to delay the inevitable, or to make himself so tired that his sleep would be dreamless. He would sit out on the cool, dewy lawns of the Silver City and watch the multicolored drifts of stars and gases in the firmament above, telling himself what Samael told him—he wasn’t alone, Father’s creation was young and vibrant and ever-growing, that light would triumph over darkness. But the words felt hollow.

Samael teased him about his “strange affliction” during the day, inviting the jeers and jokes of their other siblings as they worked together in service of Father’s creation, or played games, or ate meals. Michael still went everywhere with his twin一it’s what they’d always done一but he couldn’t help but feel hurt. Before the dreams began, they had always understood each other perfectly. But now there was this thing that apparently Samael would not, or perhaps could not, understand.

One night, Michael felt a familiar bend in the fabric of the universe behind him, and Father appeared and sat beside him on the grass. Michael’s breath caught, and he leaned away, slouching in deference. Father very rarely walked among them anymore. He said He was busy with some kind of great work and that He wasn’t to be disturbed for petty reasons.

“Beautiful night,” God commented.

“Yes, your creation is very beautiful,” Michael agreed emphatically, hoping his unhappiness wasn’t apparent.

“Gabriel mentioned that you were having trouble sleeping,” God prompted.

“No, I can sleep just fine, Father,” Michael rushed to assure him. “It’s the dreams…”

God looked at him, all-seeing eyes piercing, brow creasing in consternation. “What dreams?”

Michael quailed, dreading the thought of disappointing Father with his dissatisfaction. “It’s nothing important. They’re foolish.”

“Tell me, Michael,” Father pressed.

Unable to disobey a direct command, Michael spoke, describing the details of what he saw night after night, and the feeling it gave him—heart-pounding, gut-twisting, chilling. A sensation he’d never experienced outside of those visions.

God’s expression darkened as Michael talked. When the archangel finally fell silent, He stared down at His hands for a long moment.

“You will not be troubled by those dreams again,” God said eventually. “I will make sure of it.”

Michael released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Oh, thank you, Father!” he said, relief washing over him.

And, just as Father said, the dreams ceased. When Michael laid his head down, his sleep was deep and dreamless. He awoke refreshed and untroubled.

But the memory of them remained. And somehow Michael was…changed.

Lucifer is buried face-first between Chloe’s legs when he hears the cursed buzz of a mobile vibrating against one of his bedside tables.

He feels one of her hands leave his head to reach for it and scowls in annoyance. He’d just about worked her into the cherished state of incoherence in which no quantity of notifications, rings, or even elevator dings could distract her from the matter at hand (or at mouth, as the case may be). But there was that damned phone throwing all his hard work out the window.

“Leave it,” he growls against her, enjoying her little squirm at the sensation.

“It might be Trixie,” she insists. “Oh. It’s yours.”

“Then leave it,” he replies dismissively, working his tongue back inside her.

“I...I think you’re going to want to see this,” she says. There’s an odd note in her voice that makes him sit up on his forearms to look at her. Her brow is creased in concern as she turns the phone and holds it out to him.

He perks up, seeing the text is from Candy, but his expression immediately darkens as he reads it. The texts keep coming thick and fast, and riddled with typos and the varied attempts of autocorrect trying to make sense of her words. He understands, having had the experience before of texting with hands that won’t stop shaking, himself.

“If he’s not dead, I’m going to kill him,” Lucifer growls.

Chloe lies back onto the pillows with a resigned sigh as he rolls out of bed. “I wish you had just let me do it in the first place.”

He dresses quickly, rights his hair with a snap of his fingers, and strides back into the bedroom. Chloe is still gloriously nude, lying on her side with her head propped up on one hand, and he resists the powerful urge to throw himself at her. But responsibility calls.

“Right. I’m Vegas-bound. Hopefully I can tidy this whole mess up before dawn.” He leans down and kisses her lingeringly. “Don’t you move an inch until I come back.”

“Yes, Lord,” she teases.

He grins. “You’ll be the death of me yet.”

The emergency room of the University Medical Center in Las Vegas is a hotbed of activity even in the small hours of the morning. The chairs are filled with people in all manner of distress, nursing cuts, bruises, and broken bones, not to mention the several green-tinged individuals hunched over hospital-issue bedpans. The stink of human blood and sickness isn’t quite masked by the overwhelming antiseptic smell of the hospital itself.

Lucifer wrinkles his nose. He could fix all of them, he thinks. Wipe away their pain like it was nothing. But what then? Why these people? Wouldn’t all humans deserve such miraculous grace? He sighs instead, scanning the chairs for a familiar face.

A woman smudged with soot and holding an oxygen mask to her face glances up at him, and then leaps to her feet. “Lucifer!” she calls, casting the oxygen mask aside and hurrying towards him. Lucifer does a double-take, realizing that it’s Candy. Her mascara has run all down her face, and she’s absolutely caked from head to toe in soot. What was formerly a bright pink halter top is a dirty brown and singed around the edges, and her golden hair hangs in lanky smoke-gray tangles over her shoulders. She’s nothing like a bright, bubbly, immaculately-groomed woman he knows.

She collides with him and wraps her arms around his ribcage with a startling strong grip. He pats her comfortingly on the back.

“I’m so glad you’re here. Wait, how did you possibly get here so fast? I just texted you, like, ten minutes ago.” Lucifer opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off with a raised hand, shaking her head. “No, no. Don’t answer that. I’ve had more than enough insane things happen to me for one night.”

“Candy, what happened?”

Her eyes well with tears. “I was staying late at the club to talk to Michael, and he was一was telling me all these things, and then he stabbed a knife through his own hand, and then we heard a noise and the whole club was on fire. We tried to get out, but the back door was, I don’t know, barricaded or something. And when we tried to go out the front, it was all on fire, and I think he saved my life, but一but he got trapped, and I couldn’t一”

She struggles to speak through rising tears, and he pulls her back into his arms again, shushing her soothingly. 

“It was Carlo Ricci’s son,” she murmurs against his lapel with quiet conviction. “It must be.”

Lucifer stiffens. “And why would you have attracted the ire of the son of the most powerful mobster in New York?”

Candy pulls back, glancing up at him guiltily. “I-I had this idea for expanding the club, and Michael was so well-positioned to make the pitch, so…”

“So you chose to risk making enemies of some of the most dangerous men in the country rather than come to me,” he finishes for her.

“You know your brother would never have accepted your help.”

“And why do you care what my brother wants?”

Candy looks at her singed shoes miserably. “It doesn’t matter anymore. The doctors won’t tell me how he is since I’m not family, but I saw him when they pulled him out of the building.” Her eyes well with tears again when she looks at him. “Lucifer, it’s really bad. I’m so sorry.”

Lucifer shrugs. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s like a weed, practically impossible to kill. But I think you need to go home and get some rest.” And Michael needs her to go home, too, if Lucifer’s suspicions about the situation are correct.

Candy shakes her head adamantly. “No, I wanna stay until...until we know more.”

Lucifer grasps her by her shoulders and looks her squarely in the eye. “Candy. Go home. He’ll be here in the morning, I assure you. I’ll text you if there’s any news, and tomorrow I’ll make sure you get visitor access. Right now, you’re running on fumes and you look like a Victorian chimney sweep.” He plucks at her hair with a wry smile, and she chuckles wetly, nodding. He calls her an Uber and sees her into it before turning towards the intake desk.

Even if he weren’t actually Michael’s next of kin, it’d be the matter of a couple sentences and a charming smile to get him access to the burn unit, even before he became God. An endearingly zaftig middle-aged nurse in pink scrubs named Eleanor escorts him herself up to another nurse’s station on the fourth floor of another wing of the hospital. There, several other nurses are chattering excitedly about something, and they fall strangely silent when Eleanor announces that he’s the brother of the patient in bed 445.

In a matter of a few moments, a young, tired-looking doctor appears. Eleanor introduces him and then disappears back into the elevator with a cheeky wink.

“Mr. Morningstar,” the doctor begins. “I’m Dr. Hilfiger. Would you like to sit down?” She gestures towards a small bank of chairs in an alcove that must serve as a waiting room.

“No, thank you. I’d just like to see my brother, if that’s possible.”

“Mr. Morningstar, your brother is in very serious condition. He has third or fourth degree burns on over ninety percent of his body. We have him on enough pain medication to keep him unconscious, but I’m sorry to say that there’s no chance of survival. I’m frankly astonished that he’s lasted this long. He must be incredibly strong-willed.”

Lucifer smiles grimly. “One of the few things we have in common, I suppose.”

The doctor nods sympathetically. “Normally, we would require you to observe him from outside of the room to prevent infection, but considering his prognosis, I’ll allow you to go in and sit with him. Maybe your voice will bring him some comfort.”

“Not bloody likely,” Lucifer mutters.

The doctor nods vaguely and turns to leave, but Lucifer catches her by the elbow. “Oh, by the way, the woman who came in with him, Candy Fletcher? Could she get visitor’s access as well?”

“Only family, I’m afraid. We don’t want too many visitors up here because of the delicate nature of our patients.”

“She’s…” Lucifer casts about, trying to think of something at least vaguely truthful. Well, he was married to Candy once, wasn’t he? “She’s his sister-in-law. But they’re very close.”

Dr. Hilfiger waffles, but Lucifer turns his charm up to eleven, and she caves. “All right, I’ll add her to the visitor list.”

Lucifer stands over the hospital bed and stares at the pitiful figure of his twin, nausea rising in his throat. His mouth goes too dry to swallow properly. Michael’s entire right side looks like it was fully on fire at some point. The skin there has mostly been burned away, leaving glimpses of raw, red muscle and bone beneath. His right hand is almost skeletal, charred black. His left side was spared at least that level of damage, and is instead only red and raw, reminding Lucifer of the texture and color of his devil face. Only a few scatted patches of unburnt skin remain, one of which happens to be the left side of his face. Lucifer can just barely make out the pink end of the scar he gave him.

“Right, Candy’s gone now,” he says gruffly. “Shake off whatever vulnerability sitch you’ve gotten yourself into and heal.”

Michael groans, rousing as the efficacy of his pain medication begins to wane in Candy’s absence. He turns his head weakly towards Lucifer, one relatively undamaged eye blinking open and attempting to focus on him. “S…Samael?” he croaks, throat sounding as raw as the rest of him.

“That’s right, Mi-ka-el,” Lucifer replies with a tight smile. “Probably not your favorite sight upon waking, but I guarantee I’m better than Coldplay tickets.”

“Samael, I had one of the nightmares again,” Michael continues as if he hadn’t heard him at all, speaking the ancient, nameless angelic language that Lucifer hasn’t used since the dawn of mankind. His tone is soft and confused, unlike the brash and grating voice he’s cultivated for the past several millennia. He moans. “I don’t feel well.” He tries to raise his charred right arm, but it simply twitches sickeningly against the hospital sheets. He moans again, louder.

Lucifer feels a strange panic rise in him. Casting about for something to do, he settles on grabbing the IV line leading to Michael’s good arm and fiddling with the mechanism until the slow drip of liquid turns into a rapid patter. “There, should keep you at a nice, even high,” Lucifer says. “Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.”

Michael blinks again, his focus finally clearing and sharpening. “Lucifer,” he says.

“Welcome back, you tenacious bastard,” Lucifer replies, relieved for reasons he doesn’t care to examine.

“What happened?” Michael manages to raise his head enough to look at himself before falling back onto the pillow with a pained groan.

“You decided to pivot to a career in firefighting at a highly inopportune time, from what I can glean.”

Suddenly, Michael’s eye opens wide. “Candy! Is she一”

“She’s fine. She was insistent on waiting to see how you were. It was a right pain convincing her to go home and rest. The woman has truly horrendous taste in men, but to each their own.”

Michael relaxes again. “She’s safe,” he murmurs.

Lucifer looks down at Michael’s charred, claw-like hand with growing perplexity. “I don’t understand. You should be healing by now.”

Michael laughs, although the ragged sound that his ruined throat emits isn’t something that Lucifer would generally associate with mirth. “Never been my strong suit.”

“You’re an angel,” Lucifer persists, frowning. “You’ve flown through solar flares and across dimensional boundaries. A little earthly fire can’t possibly cause lasting damage, temporary vulnerability aside.”

Michael turns his head towards Lucifer, lone bloodshot brown eye fixing on his twin. “Was the damage I did to Remy lasting? Or to your friend Dan? Does your precious Chloe still dream about dying in agony at my hands? How does little Trixie feel about growing up without a fath—”

“ENOUGH,” Lucifer snarls, bringing his palm down on the aluminum rail of the hospital bed with enough force that it bends. Around them, the myriad beeps of the devices around them all pause for a moment, the lights dim, and even the low murmur of clinicians and patients talking in the hall outside hushes in reverence. Outside, thunder rumbles in the distance. 

“Enough,” Lucifer says more quietly, with a self-conscious glance around, composing himself. “If you want to redeem yourself, why don’t you…I don’t know, try community service or something? Save wounded puppies? Dig wells for thirsty Africans? I personally can vouch for the efficacy and entertainment value of vigilante justice. What’s the point in punishing yourself like this? How does it help anything? As God, I hereby declare you pardoned, alright? Now heal yourself.”

Michael winces and lays back onto his pillow, eye closing again. “Easier said than done.”

Lucifer thinks back to his frustration at his missing devil face, and then his terror at his hideously deformed wings. To the look on Chloe’s face when she demanded that he make himself vulnerable. How helpless he felt, how at the mercy of forces deep within himself that he couldn’t control.

“Listen, Michael,” he says quietly. “I know I’m the last person you want to hear advice from, and it certainly brings me no pleasure to be the one to deliver it to you. But you’ve quite a long eternity in front of you here on Earth. The best thing you can do is figure out some way to find peace with what you’ve done and who you are. I’ve seen souls literally burning in eternal hellfire, and it’s not a fate that I would wish on anyone, even you.”

“Spare me the holier-than-thou speech,” Michael spits out. “If you were truly a merciful god, you’d snap your fingers and heal me in an instant. Or if not that, at least kill me. But you won’t, just like Dad wouldn’t. Because it’s not ‘your place,’ right?”

“If I heal you, then why in the world wouldn’t I heal the children in this hospital dying of brutal, debilitating diseases? Why wouldn’t I abolish all death and all suffering? Erase the lines between Heaven and Hell and Earth and reunite every lost loved one? ” Lucifer gazes sadly out the window, where lightning still flashes on the horizon. “I wish it were that easy. I—I just can’t. Humans, animals, angels, every species needs free will, and with free will comes the suffering they inflict upon each other. They don’t deserve to suffer, but it’s the price of freedom. The cost of deciding your own fate.”

“You sound just like Dad,” Michael gripes. Then he snorts. “That’s why you got the job, I guess.”

Lucifer groans. “The job, ugh. It’s so bloody tedious. Everything needs to be monitored all the time! A bloody neutron star fourteen million light-years away has been acting up this week and apparently it’s my problem. And the bloody paperwork! I thought Hell was torturous.”

Michael scoffs. “Well, I could have told you that. Who do you think did all of it?”

“Oh, things make so much more sense now! Then that’s what I need! A dull, egg-headed lackey to do it for me.”

Michael chuckles raggedly, rolling his head to the left to look out the window, and Lucifer is surprised to find himself smiling, too.

“How is Candy?” Michael asks more quietly. “Fletcher’s...it’s beyond repair, I suppose. Because of me.”

“I really can’t say. She mostly talked about you. Some nonsense about stabbing your hand?”

Michael groans. “Don’t remind me. I may have...gone a bit overboard.”

“And it’s because you’re vulnerable around her now—”

“Please don’t.”

“—Because you’re in lo-o-ove, with a—what was the term you used? A ‘filthy human?’”

Michael stares resolutely out the window.

“I can’t say you don’t have good taste. But what she sees in you, I honestly cannot fathom.” Lucifer sighs and claps his hands. “Well! Think on what I said. And have Candy text me before you anger any more mobsters, please.”

“Get fucked.”

“Once I get back home, I intend to.” Lucifer grins and suddenly raises his voice, shouting, “Oh, dearie me! It’s a god-given miracle! He’s awake!”

“I hate you,” Michael mutters just before several nurses and Dr. Hilfiger rush into the room.

“Holy一he can’t be awake!” the doctor gasps. “Increase his morphine.”

One nurse stares, baffled, at the IV line. “It’s maxed out.”

Lucifer waggles his eyebrows and raises one hand in a jaunty farewell before leaving the chaos of the hospital room behind.

Candy arrives home just after sunrise in a daze. She raises her arm to drop her keys into the dish by the door, only to realize she has no keys. They were in her purse, which was in the office at the club, which was now little more than ashes. She watched it burn in desperation as she waited for the firefighters to arrive, and as she screamed at them that Michael was still inside, and during the long, agonizing moments while she waited for them to emerge again from the blazing building. It was only by virtue of the fact that she had been perched on the bumper of the first ambulance to arrive, being attended to by an EMT, that she managed to get a good look at Michael when they wheeled him past.

Her first thought was that he was already dead, burned to death for the sake of her stupid ambition. Burned to save her from the failing nightclub she’d foolishly wasted precious moments trying to extinguish. But once she got to the hospital, they told her he was alive, being treated in the burn unit, and she doubted what she’d seen. She’s starting to doubt more and more things that she thought were obviously true.

For example, the door to her apartment had been unlocked, despite the fact that she knows she locked it when she left this afternoon. She always locks it. Very strangely convenient for it to be unlocked on the one day when her keys are surely a lump of melted metal and plastic under a pile of cinders.

She does a careful check of the rest of the apartment just in case the door was unlocked for more nefarious reasons, but it’s empty, and nothing is out of place. Regardless, she locks the door behind her, throws the deadbolt, and puts up the chain before stepping into the bathroom and appraising herself. She looks almost as bad as she feels.

She removes her ruined clothes and drops them in the trash, then turns on the shower. It’s notoriously fickle and slow to heat, but for some reason, the instant it turns on, there’s plenty of gloriously hot water. She thanks god for small miracles and steps under the spray.

When she emerges from the bathroom, feeling more or less like a person again, she retrieves a business card from a drawer in her kitchen, retrieves her phone, and dials the number.

“Detective Jones,” a woman’s voice on the other end answers.

“Hi, this is Candy Fletcher. I have some information about Carlo Ricci Jr. that you might be interested in.”

Chapter Text

Eventually, Candy’s nerves quiet enough that she’s able to sleep, though she wakes up, disoriented, only a few hours later from dreams filled with fire and terror. For a moment upon waking, she forgets that the club is gone and thinks sleepily about tonight’s setlist, but then the memories come crashing back. 

Fletcher’s is gone. Michael may be dead. All that she has left is revenge.

She makes coffee, and then spends most of the early afternoon calling her employees to deliver the news. Many of them have already heard about the club’s destruction, as it was apparently a major headline on the morning news. Candy lies over and over and says she’s not sure how it happened, maybe an electrical fire.

“You’re gonna reopen, though, right?” Tina asks, her voice filled with hope. “I love working for you, Candy! Please don’t make me go back to The Mirage.”

“I don’t know,” Candy sighs. “What with how expensive it would be to rebuild and my credit score...I’d probably never get a loan to cover it, much less make enough to pay it back.” She doesn’t mention that she let her insurance lapse years ago to avoid paying the premiums and the fact that aside from the value of the land Fletcher’s sat on, she’s virtually penniless. She’s tired of all the would-haves and should-haves. She made her mistakes, and now she has to live with the consequences.

After all the calls, she has nothing left to do but go to the hospital. Candy’s been dreading this, fully expecting that the only thing she’ll learn is that Michael is either dying or already dead. If only she hadn’t pressured him into telling her his secrets. They would have left Fletcher’s long before the fire broke out. Maybe he’d be here in her apartment right now, drinking coffee at the table beside her, or maybe they’d still be in bed, enjoying each other’s company in a more physical sense.

When she woke up, there had been a text on her phone from Lucifer saying simply that Michael was alive and that she’d be allowed to visit him today, but it had been radio silence ever since. Presumably the hospital would have told him if Michael had died, and Lucifer would have let her know. But who knows? Who was she to Michael, after all, other than a boss? A friend with benefits? Perhaps a business partner? None of those were relationships that warranted any kind of special consideration. She has no real right to visit him in the hospital. And yet, she wants to一needs to一nonetheless.

So, she dresses and heads out, stopping briefly at her landlord’s apartment to tell him she needs a new set of keys, and briefly explaining the reason why. Grumbling, he gives her a spare and warns her in broken, Polish-accented English, “No more fire!”  She heartily agrees.

Candy steps out of an Uber in front of the hospital’s entrance and takes a calming breath before heading inside. She follows the signs through the labyrinth of interconnected buildings to the burn unit. When she finally steps through the elevator doors, she hears arguing from down the hall.

“—I went in last, and now it’s your turn, Manny!” sounds a shrill woman’s voice.

“I’ve got five other patients today, and he doesn’t like me!”

“It doesn’t matter if he’s ‘too creepy’ or ‘doesn’t like you.’ He doesn’t like anyone, so just suck it up, roll him over, and change the bedding.”

“Fine. But this is the last time this shift. I don’t do this just to be insulted by a talking corpse.”

Candy hesitantly approaches the desk where the two nurses are arguing. The shrill voice belongs to an older woman with short, extensively teased bottle-blonde hair, and the other is a short, stocky Latino with a mustache. The woman turns to look at her, smoothing her expression into one of bland politeness. “Can I help you?”

Candy displays her visitor badge. “I’m Candy Fletcher. I’m here to see, uh, Michael,” she says, feeling silly when she realizes she still doesn’t know his last name.

Both nurses visibly react when she says Michael’s name, flinching and glancing at each other.

“Manny will take you, and after you leave, he will be changing Michael’s bedding,” the woman says pointedly.

Manny shoots the other nurse a dirty look and gestures for Candy to follow him.

Candy comes to a dead stop outside the room with a gasp. She can see Michael through a large plate glass observation window. His face is in profile from her perspective, laying in a hospital bed with the back angled up a bit, his right side facing her. He doesn’t have much of a face left, as far as she can tell. She can clearly see the ridges of his skull beneath thoroughly charred scraps of skin and muscle and tendon. His body is a burned ruin, legs strangely thin beneath the sheet. How is he still alive?

Manny raises his eyebrows sympathetically at her as he opens the door and sweeps into the room. Michael’s head rolls to the side to look at him, and Candy realizes with the smallest amount of relief that the left side of his face is less thoroughly burnt, with some patches of undamaged skin still present.

“Well, if it isn’t Mini Manny,” Michael croaks, in a voice that’s damaged but still recognizable. “Did they put something special in my IV last time? I’m feeling particularly floaty at the moment.”

“You have a visitor,” Manny says, ignoring Michael’s insult as he busies himself with checking the IV line, nodding towards the hallway.

“Please don’t tell me it’s my brother ag一” Michael’s head rocks towards the window and freezes when he spots her standing on the other side, his lone brown eye going wide.

Candy raises a hand in greeting and gives a wobbly smile, turning to follow Manny through the open door.

Manny types something briefly into a computer terminal in the corner of the room, and then gives her a tight smile. “I’ll let you two catch up,” he says dryly, hustling out the door and closing it behind him.

Candy walks around to Michael’s left side, pulls a small chair from the corner up to the bed, and sits in it. He watches her mutely all the while, utterly motionless.

“I guess I probably don’t need to ask how you are,” Candy jokes bleakly, breaking the silence.

“Well, the morphine is feeling a lot better now that you’re here. They refuse to give me as much as I need normally because it’s apparently ‘a lethal dose,’ or something,” Michael gripes. “But if I start falling asleep, would you mind closing that valve down a bit?” He gestures up at his IV bag with his good hand.

Candy shakes her head, confused. “Are you telling me they won’t give you enough for the pain?” If someone in his condition doesn’t deserve unlimited opioids, she doesn’t know who possibly would. She feels tears welling in her eyes, unable to even comprehend the agony he must be in.

He blinks slowly, the remnants of his face creasing in a frown as her tears begin to fall. “No, no, no. None of that.” 

His raw, blistered left hand rises to her face, and he brushes a tear from her cheek. She notices the slightly darker inch-long wound in his palm, barely visible against his burns, one of the few parts of the landscape of his pain that she’s familiar with. She catches his hand and presses a kiss to his palm, to the injury she thought was so important to treat only last night.

He watches her silently, his eye wide and intent, and his scarred, twisted lips parted.

“Thank you for saving me,” she whispers, lowering his hand back to the bed and holding it delicately between hers, mindful of his burns.

“I don’t—” he begins. His throat clicks as he swallows. “You’re welcome.”

There’s an awkward pause as they stare at each other.

“How is Fletcher’s?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I’m not holding out hope.” She gives a pained chuckle. “I haven’t had the guts to go back yet, but I watched it burn for while last night.”

“Fucking Junior,” he hisses. “That little weasel.”

“This is probably going to upset you, but I called that police detective. Jones. I told her what I knew about Junior wanting to take over Vegas operations, and that he was behind the fire.”

His brow rises in alarm. “You did what?”

“She said she wouldn’t put my name on any police records, it was just between us.”

“That’s assuming that she isn’t corrupt. Candy, you know what they do to police informants.”

“Yeah, I know, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just let him get away with that, like it was nothing. That club was my life,” her voice breaks, the emotion of last night, of seeing all that she loved go up in flames, rushing back.

His dark eye blazes. “Oh, he’s not going to get away with it, I’ll make sure of it.”

Candy gives his bedridden form a pointed, skeptical look.

“Eventually,” he amends.

“I don’t know. In the heat of the moment, it felt like calling the cops would actually make something happen, but when I really think about it, what is it really going to accomplish? Unless he left DNA evidence or something, how would they possibly pin it on him? And he probably didn’t even do it himself. I just—” She growls and swipes at the tears that had begun to accumulate in her eyes again. “Ugh, I hate crying,” she gripes. “Ruins my eye makeup.”

“You look perfect,” he says with uncharacteristic, raw sincerity. She looks back at him, the words unsaid between them hanging in the air like something tangible. He clears his throat, breaking eye contact. “Assuming you want to look like a raccoon in a blonde wig.”

“That’s a flattering image.”

“Thanks. Go ahead, feel free to tell me I look like a piece of raw hamburger that fell into the grill. I can take it.”

Candy snorts and grins. He begins to smile back, but hisses in pain at the strain it puts on his burnt face.

“So, is there anything I can bring you to make you more comfortable? Stuff from your motel room? Books, or magazines, or something?” she asks hopefully. Anything to combat this feeling of utter helplessness.

“Hmm,” he muses. “Well, with the slop they call food, you’d think they assumed my tongue got burnt off, too. I wouldn’t mind something nicer to eat.”

“Got it,” replies Candy confidently.

“And…” He looks away from her almost shyly. “The nurses here are mostly dull idiots. Talking to them is worse than trying to make conversation with some of my brothers, and that’s saying something. I’d…I’d like it if you visited again, just to talk. If you wanted.”

“Of course.” She’s almost offended he’d think that she would just leave him here to suffer alone.

The undamaged corner of his mouth twitches upward, and his eyelid, which has been getting lower and heavier over the course of their conversation, begins to close. His breathing slows and evens, and he drifts off into a drugged slumber.

She sits with him for a while longer, wrestling with her conflicting feelings about him. An admitted murderer, but someone willing to sacrifice his life for her. Unquestionably—and even unapologetically—an asshole, and yet surprisingly sweet to her at the oddest moments. 

Eventually, Manny reappears in the doorway, a stack of bedding in his arms. He blinks in surprise at the scene. “Oh, he’s asleep? I guess it had to happen eventually. He’s been awake and hassling us ever since the start of my shift.”

Candy smiles sadly. “Sounds about right.” She strokes the back of his hand one last time, and places it on the mattress beside him, then does a double-take. Squarely in the middle of his palm, where only minutes ago there was the angry red line of his self-inflicted knife wound, there is nothing but a patch of unblemished tan skin.

When Michael wakes, the lights in his room are dimmed, and it’s dark outside. The hospital beyond his door has quieted to nothing but the occasional murmured conversation and the irritating, incessant background chorus of beeping machines. The pain is back, a continuous scream of sensation only somewhat muted by the human-safe dose of painkillers they’re pumping into him. He’s almost grateful for the areas where his skin is gone, since that means fewer nerves to inform him how badly he’s been hurt. It was much nicer with Candy here. All sense of the mutilated state of his body wafted away on the sweet waves of morphine.

The seat beside him is empty, but there’s a faint hint of her perfume still in the air. It reassures him that her visit wasn’t a wild, drug- or pain-induced hallucination, after all. Her concern for him, and her absurd, irrational gratitude were actually real.

But unfortunately, so was the fact that she’s yet again put herself in harm’s way by talking to that cop. And he’s in no shape to defend her at the moment. (And you never will be again, an insidious voice in his mind whispers.)

He reaches over with his left hand, grasps the charred, skeletal tangle that is his right forearm, and drags it onto his chest, gritting his teeth against a scream of agony as he feels scabs ripping open. He presses his left palm to what remains of his right palm and closes his eyes, casting his mind outward. “You had better not fucking ghost me this time, Gabriel,” he hisses.

“Who said I’ve been ghosting you?” His sister chuckles uneasily from where she now stands at the foot of his bed, eyeing him with a grimace and looking particularly out of place in her sky-blue robes. “Geez, you don’t look too great, bro.”

“Thanks for the info,” he deadpans.

“Why aren’t you healing?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Gabriel shrugs. “Well, what can I do you for?”

“I need you to keep an eye on Candice Fletcher. She’s a human here in Las Vegas. I can give you her address—”

“Oh, Candy! Yeah, I know all about her.” Gabriel winks.

“Why?” He squints at her suspiciously.

“Well, you and her have been doing the—“ Gabriel makes a series of obscene gestures and facial expressions. “So it felt like it was worth keeping track of her. Gotta know who my favorite bro’s dating, after all.”

Michael cringes, closing his eye in humiliation at the thought of now being a subject of conversation in Gabriel’s celestial gossip network. “Anyway. There may be some extremely unpleasant humans coming after her.”

“And you don’t want your boo getting hurt. I feel you.” Gabriel smiles slyly, nodding. “It’s fine, I’ll just have to run it past Lucifer first.”

“What?”

“Yeah, one of Lucifer’s new rules is that we need to check with him before messing with humans. It’s a whole deal. He’s gotten kinda paranoid since the war. Not very happy about his humans getting killed. I guess you two have that in common now! But I really did not expect that he’d be a rule-making kind of god, you know?”

“He’s more like Dad than he would ever admit,” Michael mutters. He sighs. “Fine. Tell Lucifer. Though I can’t imagine he’d trouble himself to interfere if she were in danger. He’s all about ‘not infringing upon mortals’ free will’ these days,” he sneers.

“For real. I miss the days when we used to get to come down with the trumpets and heavenly glory and stuff to deliver prophecies. You’d be all, ‘Be not afraid,’ and they still always shit themselves.” Gabriel sighs nostalgically.

“Yeah, those were the days,” Michael agrees. “Well, assuming you get Lucifer’s godly approval, feel free to make anyone who comes after Candy shit themselves. They’ll certainly deserve it.”

“Roger that! Any other messages you want delivered to our siblings while I’m here?”

Michael’s first instinct is to sneer at her. What does he owe those self-centered ingrates, after all, none of whom ever actually liked him, anyway? Virtually none of them ever would have supported him in the war if he hadn’t threatened them with death. Not a single one of them has bothered to visit since his exile to Earth. And yet…

“Tell them all…tell them I’m sorry for Remy,” he says quietly.

Gabriel nods solemnly. “I got you.”

“Thanks,” he replies, clearing his throat to dislodge a pesky tightness there.

“Is that everything? ‘Cause I got things to do, you know.”

An idea strikes him suddenly, and his lips twist in a devious grin. “There’s just one more thing. How would you like to help me play a little prank on the worm who did this to me?”

Working in entertainment for a lifetime made Candy a consummate night owl. She’s always had things to do and places to be at night. It was the time for working, for grifting, and for having fun. But now her workplace is gone, and she isn’t much in the mood for a night on the town. She feels strangely exposed out on the streets of the city she loves today, looking over her shoulder for men in tracksuits whose eyes linger on her just a bit too long.

So at 10 PM, she finds herself sitting on her couch in the unaccustomed quiet, thinking over her visit to the hospital. She’s never been a particularly superstitious person. Never believed in ghosts or god, and especially not in the healing power of love, but she can’t come up with a single explanation for the disappearance of Michael’s wound. It makes her doubt the evidence of her eyes, something that’s never happened before. Maybe she’s going insane, she wonders idly. It’s been an overwhelming 24 hours. It’s natural for the brain to react a little oddly.

Nonetheless, her memory of that smooth, undamaged skin on his hand dogs her. She turns off the TV with a frustrated sigh—trashy reality shows are doing absolutely nothing to hold her interest—and takes out her phone. She opens up the browser and searches “Michael + angel.”

The first result that comes up is a Wikipedia page for “Michael (archangel).” She scrolls through it, scanning the long article idly. Apparently he’s a revered figure in many faiths, known for fighting Lucifer (which sounds about right, she thinks) and for being a protective figure (also right to her, at least, but perhaps not to anyone else). There are paintings of him, too, most depicting him as a figure with flowing blonde hair and a mild, serene expression that couldn’t be further from the Michael she knows if they tried. For a moment, she entertains the image of Michael with long, wavy blonde hair and giggles.

Most of it sounds like a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo as far as she’s concerned, though. She spends a while skimming the synopsis of the 1996 Nora Ephron film, Michael, starring John Travolta, which she vaguely remembers seeing as a child, before tossing her phone onto the coffee table with a frustrated sigh. She’s not sure what exactly she was looking for. A website that says, “Michael is a mystical creature, and he looks like this!” next to a photo of the man himself?

She’s halfway through deep-cleaning her kitchen out of utter boredom when her phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number.

Hi, Candy. This is Chloe Decker. Lucifer told me you might have some questions about him and certain siblings. I just wanted to let you know that I’m here if you need someone to talk to. Or even just to vent. I know how isolating it can feel to be surrounded by that kind of weirdness.

Candy blinks at the message for a long time, reading it over and over again. There’s no question who she means by “certain siblings.” On its face, it’s just a sympathetic text from one person involved with members of a crazy family to another, but there’s something there beneath the surface, something subtly implied. What exactly does she mean by “that kind of weirdness?” Michael is a misanthrope and not exactly your average middle-aged guy, but personality-wise, “weird” is not the first word she’d use to describe him. The only really overtly strange thing he’s done was that wild rant where he insisted he was an angel. Notably similar, of course, to Lucifer’s constant insistence that he’s the devil.

Risking Chloe thinking she’s an absolute nutcase, Candy takes a wild leap.

By weirdness, do you mean something like a wound healing in a matter of minutes?

Chloe’s response comes almost immediately.

Yep, exactly like that

Candy’s heart skips a beat in alarm.

Or like Michael being able to force someone to tell him their fears?

He hasn’t done it to you, has he?

No

I mean, not deliberately

Good

I’m obligated as a fellow human to tell you he’s a sociopathic bastard and you should stay away from him

A fellow human?

Yes

Because he’s...not?

What do you think?

I really don’t know anymore

My advice: trust your instincts.

If something feels off or doesn’t make sense, you may need to broaden your definition of what’s possible

Believe me, it wasn’t easy for me, either

Candy stares at her phone, perplexed. She doesn’t know Chloe Decker all that well, but she would not have pegged her as someone prone to believing in things like god and angels and the devil. 

She stands at her kitchen counter, staring at the phone, lost in thought, for a long time. That night, she dreams of Michael stepping out of the inferno as Fletcher’s burns, two flaming wings stretching out behind him, and a sword clasped in his hand.

Chapter Text

Candy wakes far too early to the sound of her apartment intercom buzzing. She heaves herself out of bed, puts on her robe, and trudges to the front door.

“Hello?” she croaks, jamming the talk button.

“Candice Fletcher? This is Officer Jimenez from the LVPD. I’m investigating the fire at your club the night before last and wanted to ask you a few questions.”

A shock of anxiety runs through her, but she buzzes the officer in and waits at the door, gnawing a fingernail, until he arrives.

Officer Jimenez is a young, square-jawed man with a crew cut who gives her bathrobe-clad body a once-over that lasts a little longer than professionalism would dictate, but Candy’s used to it. She busies herself with brewing a pot of coffee while he seats himself at her kitchen table and flips open a notepad.

“Ms. Fletcher, you were present in your club when the fire broke out, is that correct?” he asks.

“Yes, I was inside,” she says quietly, pouring steaming coffee into two mugs. “I barely got out, and my…my bouncer wasn’t as lucky. Cream or sugar?”

“I take it black, thanks. And the property was uninsured?”

Candy sighs, setting the mugs down on the table and sitting heavily in the chair opposite him. “That’s right. Are you here to lecture me about what a bad decision that was?”

Officer Jimenez gives her a sympathetic smile. “Not at all. If it had been insured, this conversation would be going a lot differently. The fire department’s investigators found evidence of the use of accelerants. Gasoline,” he clarifies at Candy’s quizzical look. “Which means it’s very likely this will be ruled an arson. We take that crime very seriously here, as you can imagine, especially when it results in injury. If you had any motive for burning the club down, you’d be our prime suspect.”

Jimenez gives her a piercing look over the lip of his cup of coffee. “Is there anyone you can think of who may have had a reason to want to destroy the club, or to harm you or your bouncer?”

Candy swallows, careful to keep her thoughts off of her face. Detective Jones was one thing. Candy trusted her, for some reason. She doesn’t know a thing about this officer, with his cop haircut and bland expression, but a voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Michael’s whispers, all cops are bastards. “Well, the building sat on prime downtown real estate. There are probably a lot of people who would be happy to see that land on the market,” she says. “Do you want me to give you a list of every hotel developer in Vegas?”

“No one with a grudge against you, personally, though?” 

Candy looks him dead in the eyes. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Do you know if your bouncer had any enemies?”

“I don’t really know him all that well. He’s only worked for me for about a month.”

“The hospital’s records have his name down as just ‘Michael,’ is that correct?”

Candy nods.

“No last name?”

She gives him a conspiratorial smile. “Just between us, he was being paid under the table. Money is tight these days, you know? I never really needed to know his last name.”

Jimenez jots something down on his notepad and looks back up at her solemnly. “Well, I think that’s all the questions I have for you at this time. Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else from you.” He lifts his coffee cup and downs the rest in a long swig. “Much obliged for the coffee.”

Candy relays the conversation to Michael while unpacking the contents of a bag of takeout from her favorite Indian place onto the small table that swings over his bed. He watches the various containers appear hungrily, unsubtly sniffing the air.

“And you said his name was Jimenez?” he asks absently as she lowers a foil-wrapped packet of garlic naan to the table in front of him.

“Yeah, why?”

“Oh, no reason,” he replies, all-too-innocently.

She levels him a skeptical stare which he ignores, instead busying himself with unwrapping a plastic fork and spoon one-handed by banging the utensils on the rail of his bed until they burst through the wrapper. Candy takes the opportunity to confirm, for now the fourth time, that the healed area on his left hand has expanded, and now healthy skin covers the entirety of his palm and the back of his hand. She had first noticed it when she entered the room and found Michael stretching upward to futz with his IV line himself.

“You’re sure you’re feeling okay?” she asks with a dubious glance at where his pain medication has slowed to a glacial drip as she pries the lids off of the plastic containers of curry.

“Yes, mother,” he huffs, rolling his eye. “I won’t be drifting off in the middle of a conversation this time. If you want me asleep, you’ll have to be really boring.”

Candy snorts. “I’ll try my best.”

He pulls a container of chicken korma towards him and scoops up a heaping forkful, cramming it eagerly into his mouth. Almost instantly, he hisses and his face contorts. He throws his head back onto his pillow and writhes on the bed in what looks like abject pain.

“My burns! The spices!” he hisses.

Candy leaps to her feet, panicked, hands hovering over him ineffectually. “Oh my god, Michael! Are you okay?”

His pained writhing halts abruptly, and he cracks his eye open to look at her, smiling slyly. “Just messing with you.”

“You dick!” Candy tries unsuccessfully to suppress a smile, wishing she could smack him. Or kiss him. Maybe both.

Instead, she shakes her head and spears a cube of paneer. After eating for a while in comfortable silence, she points at his left hand with her fork. “What does your doctor say about that?”

“Oh, about my little miracle?” He asks, cocking an eyebrow. “That I’m a medical oddity. The find of the century. Going to make her career, apparently, if she would ever get any comprehensible results for my blood tests back from the lab. From what I can glean, everyone’s quite confused.”

“Because you’re an angel,” Candy says carefully, trying the words in her mouth like a new food, not sure what she thinks of them.

He eats another forkful of korma, avoiding her eyes. “Yep.”

She hums noncommittally and looks down at the container of rice she’s been poking at.

“What are your thoughts on that?” he ventures after another period of silence, his posture strangely still and rigid, his lone eye now fixed on her intently.

Candy considers for a moment. When she speaks, she chooses her words carefully. “I…I’ve seen a lot that I can’t explain. It still seems…unlikely to me. There is probably a better explanation. But I haven’t figured out what that explanation is yet.”

Michael releases his breath in a long exhale, as if he’d been holding it, relaxing slightly. 

Candy clears her throat. “Anyway. You seem better today. Beyond just your hand.” And it’s true. His terribly burned right side seems a bit less decimated, less frail, though it’s still honestly so grisly that it’s difficult for her to look at. 

When she manages to tear her eyes away from his burns, she catches him watching her with an expression on his face of uncharacteristic vulnerability and longing. It’s only there for a moment before he composes himself, his expression schooled to one of cool detachment.

“Still hurts like a bitch,” he grouses, snagging a piece of naan and dunking it in sauce before stuffing it in his mouth.

She smiles to herself. “Stop hogging the bread,” she scolds, snatching another piece that he’d been about to grab.

“Hey! I had dibs on that!” he tries to grab it back from her, but she leans backwards, away from his bed, holding it out of reach and grinning. “Taunting an invalid? That’s low,” he pouts.

“You’ve had plenty. Don’t be a baby,” Candy smirks and rips off a chunk of naan for herself, then hands the rest back to him.

Long after she leaves the hospital, a smile lingers on her face.

Days in the hospital melt together, mind-numbingly similar. Michael wakes from dreams where he’s fleeing through twisting, burning passageways that keep collapsing in on him. Dreams where he’s terrified and lost and alone. In the flames, he sees the face of a human fighting tooth and nail to maintain his grip on the tiniest piece of godhood. He sees Remiel, cold and disdainful, even as he struck her a fatal blow. He sees Daniel Espinoza weeping at the grave of his lost love, terrified at the prospect of being condemned to Hell. He sees his brother’s grief-stricken face as he cradles Chloe Decker’s lifeless body. All of them judge him, find him guilty. Each a tongue of flame lashing at him, burning him terribly.

He wakes to the reality that the burning is all too real, inscribed into his flesh, an endless, inescapable agony. He’s never had the greatest relationship with his body in the best of times. He wears it like an ill-fitting suit, never quite comfortable. In some ways, it’s always felt more like Lucifer’s body and appearance, and as if Michael were only borrowing it. An impostor wearing a face that people mostly associate with someone else.

Ever since he was young, there’d be a brief moment, a flash of excitement when one of his family members caught sight of him and thought he was his twin, instantly replaced by disappointment when they realized he wasn’t. He first started pretending to be Lucifer just to see how long he could make it last, to see how it felt to be the golden boy, the one everyone liked best. How long before the truth became apparent, before the differences he couldn’t hide emerged.

His siblings assumed he wanted to become his twin, that he was trying to be like Lucifer, but they were wrong. All he ever wanted was for being himself to be enough. To feel how it felt to not be seen as something lesser-than. To not have to conform to expectations tailored to someone else.

And now that his feelings about his appearance have been made manifest on his body, there’s a strange sense of rightness to it. Just as the scar Lucifer put on his face seemed content to linger, the burns seem a fitting outward embodiment of his difference, of his inadequacy, of his foul, murderous soul. Sometimes, during the long, purgatorial nights in his hospital room, when he has nothing to occupy his mind but his thoughts and the pain, he almost comes to enjoy it. Thinking about his regrets and mistakes and inadequacies as his damaged body inundates him with agony. It feels right, somehow. Grimly satisfying.

He’s not a fool, after all. He knows this is why he hasn’t healed. He wonders sometimes how deep his self-loathing goes. How much more damage he could have taken. How much more suffering would still feel “right” to his subconscious.

But then the morning dawns, and she appears, like an avatar of mercy, and all the pain, all the recriminations, all the anger seems to slip away on cool waves of morphine, on the scent of her perfume, on the gold and pink shimmer of light in her hair, on the sensation of her lips on his blistered palm. 

Candy, with her inexplicable grace and forgiveness, who wastes her time on a bitter, twisted, hideous, ancient thing like him. Even after he frightened her, told her the ugly truth about himself, endangered her life, and caused the destruction of her livelihood. She sits there and laughs at his jokes and feeds him and sheds tears over his pain. He’s overwhelmed by it. Can’t really wrap his head around it. But—greedy, selfish creature he is—he accepts it all anyway. 

Ever since she first sized him up as he stepped off that bus, blinking in the desert sun, she’s never expected him to be anything but who he is. Never forced a comparison between him and his twin. Never asked him for anything he couldn’t provide. He wishes so desperately that he were worthy of her. He has pathetic fantasies of appearing at her apartment one morning, instead, whole and handsome and unburnt. Of sweeping her up in his arms and making love to her for hours. Of unfurling his wings and flying her into the clouds while she whoops and cries in delight. Of watching her perform to all the praise and adulation she deserves while her eyes stay fixed on his, in a version of Fletcher’s that’s immaculate and thriving under their joint management.

It’s an idiotic but pleasant escape from the harsh reality. His body reminds him of the truth without fail. He puts away his foolish daydreams and instead counts the minutes until her return.

When Candy visits the hospital on the one-week anniversary of the fire, there’s a young woman sitting cross-legged at the end of Michael’s bed as she crosses the threshold to his room. The woman has dark, curly hair and is wearing a blue ombré dress that looks like it’d be better-suited to a Renaissance faire than a hospital room. Michael is also sitting up as far as he can, and on the blanket between them is a multitude of strange, ornate playing cards of some kind that Candy doesn’t recognize.

“Oh, sorry to interrupt you,” Candy says, frozen awkwardly in the doorway with a bag of Lebanese food in hand. An unexpected flare of jealousy blindsides her一who is this woman and what right does she have to be sitting so casually on his bed? Surely Michael would have mentioned it to her if he had a close friend coming to visit, right?

Michael, who’d been staring down at the cards laid out in front of him with a furrowed brow, glances up in surprise at her voice. “Candy! Come in. You’re not interrupting. But now it makes sense why you’re suddenly winning,” he adds under his breath, shooting a glare at the stranger on his bed. The woman gives Candy a conspiratory, impish grin as he reaches up to lower his pain meds.

When he’s done during down the IV, Michael gestures at the woman on his bed. “This is my sister一”

“Gabriel,” the woman finishes for him, extending a hand to Candy. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much.”

“Oh, you’re his...other sister,” Candy says, shaking Gabriel’s hand and revising her idea of Michael and Lucifer’s family size yet again. She looks absolutely nothing like her two brothers, and Candy wonders idly if she’s a half-sister or adopted.

“One of many, but I’m his favorite,” Gabriel grins. Michael rolls his eyes, but the expression on his face betrays more than a hint of fondness.

“We can put this game on hold,” Michael says hastily, reaching to gather up the cards.

“No, don’t stop playing on my account!” Candy smiles, walking around the foot of the bed. She sets the bag of food down on the table and sits in her customary chair beside Michael. He gives her a brief, private smile that Gabriel nonetheless clearly sees, and the two siblings go back to their game. It seems to involve setting cards down in some kind of pattern, occasionally rotating them or sliding two cards to partially overlap each other. Candy watches it for several minutes with the sharp eye of someone raised around card games, and still can’t make heads or tails of it. She shrugs and takes a bite out of her shawarma wrap.

Michael inverts a card depicting what appears to be a stylized rose with arms with a flourish. Gabriel blinks down at the game for a long moment, then growls in frustration and throws her hand down on the bed.

Michael gives her a shark-like smile. “Do you resign?”

Gabriel sighs. “Yes. I hate playing against you.”

Michael begins gathering up the cards, carefully sorting them into a particular order. “That’s because your technique hasn’t improved in eons. You have to think more than one move ahead, as I always tell you. You get distracted by easy, short-term wins and lose sight of your strategy.”

While he’s talking, Gabriel pulls a face and mouths “blah, blah, blah,” flapping her fingers and thumb like a mouth. When Michael glances up again, she stops abruptly, the picture of innocence. Candy grins.

“Oh, by the way,” Gabriel says as Michael hands her the tidy stack of cards. “I did that errand, just like you asked.”

“And called in the tip?”

“It’s so called in. I love calling in tips.”

“Excellent.” Michael smiles, eyes flicking towards Candy and away again.

“What’s this about?” Candy asks, suspicious.

“A little surprise gift for you. For both of us, really,” Michael replies.

“I think I’m kind of over surprises at the moment.”

“I promise, you’ll like this one.”

“That just makes me more nervous.”

Michael just laughs and gestures for her to hand him his sandwich, which he’s been eyeing hungrily. Candy unwraps it half-way and gives it to him, smiling in amusement as he starts tearing into it.

Gabriel clears her throat. “So, uh, unless there’s another sandwich in there for me, I’ll get out of your hair. Don’t want to be a third wheel on your date.”

Michael chokes slightly on his food, and Candy feels herself blushing a little. “There actually is a third sandwich in here,” she says, gesturing to the bag. “I bought it because his stomach is a bottomless pit and he keeps eating my food, too. You’re welcome to it, if you want. And you’re welcome to stay.”

Michael makes a noise of protest through his full mouth as Candy passes his second pita wrap over to his sister. Gabriel grins, accepting it and tearing into it with only a hair more decorum than Michael.

The three eat in amiable silence for a few moments. Michael finishes his food first, sucking greedily at the straw on his soda, and Candy passes him the side of hummus and pita she bought when he starts eyeing Gabriel’s wrap greedily.

“Gabriel’s an, uh, interesting name,” Candy says when she starts nearing the end of her wrap.

“I know, kind of a dude’s name these days, right?” Gabriel replies sagely, chewing. “You can put the emphasis on the last syllable, if you want. I switch back and forth every few millennia, but I usually don’t bother changing my name.”

Candy nods vaguely, not sure what to say to that. She doesn’t know much about religion, but even before she read the Wikipedia article on Michael (archangel), she’d heard of Gabriel. Kind of a quintessential angel. So either more evidence in the “wild things that are possibly true” column, or more evidence that Michael’s parents were whack jobs obsessed with religious naming conventions. Which she still thinks is the likelier story.

“So, where do you live? Was it a long trip down here?” Candy asks.

Gabriel freezes, eyes darting to Michael. He makes a permissive gesture with a piece of pita. “Well, the Silver City,” she says hesitantly. “Kind of both a short and a long trip from everywhere.”

“Where is that? New Mexico?”

“No, uh, Heaven.”

“Oh.” Candy picks awkwardly at the aluminum foil around her wrap, trying to stifle the low-level ongoing scream of frustration and confusion that’s been sounding in her head for the past week.

“I spend a lot of time on Earth, though,” Gabriel continues hurriedly. “Lots of time. In fact, I’ve been spending a lot of it outside your apartment一”

Michael makes an abrupt, negating gesture at his neck.

“You what?” Candy asks. Gabriel freezes, her eyes darting anxiously to Michael.

“You know what? I’m gonna go. You two probably need some time alone to talk,” the alleged angel squeaks, snatching up the playing cards from the bedside table and clutching the remains of her wrap to her chest before hurrying out of the room. Immediately after she’s out of sight, there’s a loud, deep whoosh noise that Candy can’t identify, and then silence.

“Did you ask your sister to spy on me?” Candy asks.

Michael avoids her eyes, toying with a piece of pita. “Just asked her to look out for you,” he mutters. “In case your friend, Detective Jones, let something slip that got back to the Riccis.”

Candy softens. It’s creepy, sure, but it’s also oddly sweet. “No offense, but unless Gabriel has some super secret karate training, I’m pretty sure I could take her in a fight. Not sure how she’d do against mob assassins.”

Michael smiles slightly. “You’d be surprised.”

“Angels are all basically John Wick?”

“No, but they are invulnerable.”

Candy shoots his injuries a pointed look.

“Most of them are invulnerable,” Michael amends. 

“Weird, because humans happen to be non-invulnerable, too.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“Some might say that a more logical answer for why you were burned in a fire is that you’re a standard-issue fully-vulnerable human.”

“Maybe. Though you might want to talk to my doctor, because I think she’s almost getting mad that I haven’t died yet. Apparently it ‘makes no medical sense.’”

Candy shakes her head and laughs, just as her phone starts vibrating on the table between them. She peers at the caller ID, and her heart leaps when she sees it’s Officer Jimenez. Interestingly, Michael makes no comment as she picks the phone up and answers it, instead just watching her carefully.

“Hello?” she says.

“Candy? This is Officer Jimenez of the LVPD. We spoke on Monday? I wanted to call you because there’s been a break in the case of the fire at your club.”

“Oh?” Candy replies, her voice barely more than an anxious squeak.

“Yes, we got a tip from an eyewitness and some information from another department. After following up on that tip, we obtained DNA evidence connecting the arson to a New York resident named Carlo Ricci, Jr. Are you familiar with him?”

“No, not as far as I remember,” she replies, looking at Michael, who is wearing a slowly widening, devious smile. 

“Well, he has quite a rap sheet back in New York, according to my colleague in Organized Crime. Multiple drug charges, OWIs, one weapons offense, two alleged sexual assaults. You’re sure you’ve never met?”

“A lot of men visited my club, officer. I can hardly be expected to know all of them by name.”

“My colleague in Organized Crime has suggested there may be a connection between Ricci and your bouncer, the one in the hospital. I’ve been told he’s in critical condition and is unavailable for questioning.”

Michael nods encouragingly.

“Yeah, that’s what I hear, too,” Candy says dryly. He gives her a thumbs up.

“Thank you for your time, Ms. Fletcher. I’ll be in touch.”

Candy hangs up and blinks incredulously at Michael, who’s now grinning. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I didn’t do anything. But I did have Gabriel steal some, uh, quite used Kleenex from Junior’s trash and plant it in the alley behind Fletcher’s. And then have her call in a tip saying that she saw a man matching his description masturbating in the alley right before the fire.”

“Michael, that’s incredibly illegal,” she says, struck almost speechless.

He scoffs, as if that’s a silly thing to take away from it. “I was thinking, there are a couple of routes you could take if you want to get enough money to rebuild Fletcher’s. Either you take him to court and get paid damages for it, or you use it to get some hush money from Don Carlo. That’s probably the safer route, but it’s up to you which一”

She cuts him off by abruptly leaning over him, clasping both his burnt and unburnt cheeks, and kissing him deeply. He tastes of tahini and garlic sauce and she doesn’t think she’s ever liked him more. He makes a noise against her and melts against her lips, his left hand coming up to cup her cheek, and his scarred mouth softening, and…changing? 

She opens her eyes as she kisses him and watches, astounded, as a golden light spreads from his lips outward in a growing ripple across his ruined right cheek. In its wake, his skin is smooth and flawless. His missing right eye reappears suddenly, screwed shut in pleasure. She feels the skin change beneath her fingertips, a warm, shifting sensation like nothing she’s ever felt before. She gasps and breaks away from him. He chases her mouth for a split second before his eyes blink open and he stares at her.

She watches as the golden ripple peters out just beneath his jawline, where the freshly healed skin blends smoothly back into his burns.

“Michael, it’s—your一” she stammers, touching his face, running her hand upwards to his inexplicably restored hair, stroking her fingertips over his right eyebrow.

He releases her face and touches his own. “Well, what do you know,” he marvels.

“That’s—you—you’re actually an angel,” she whispers. It finally doesn’t feel wrong on her lips. 

It’s fucking terrifying.

Chapter Text

Candy barely remembers leaving the hospital, and getting in her car and driving is little more than a blur. Her mind brims with wild thoughts, thoughts she’s been keeping at bay for the past several days. She distracted herself with worrying about Michael’s condition, and about what she’d do with her destroyed club, and what would happen to her career. It was so much easier to think about those things, things she could feel and see and understand, than to contemplate the insane things Michael told her the night of the fire.

Easy to dismiss his claims that he was a murderer, or an angel, and certainly easier to think about than the idea that her immature ex-husband was now God. And sure, she couldn’t explain Michael’s healed hand or Lucifer’s instantaneous travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but there were a lot of things in this world that she didn’t understand. How airplanes stayed in the air, for example. The assembly instructions for some brands of flat-pack furniture. Why people liked Donald Trump. 

But seeing something clearly magical happen up close, beneath her own fingertips一that was beyond the pale. That was something she just couldn’t handwave away. It threw everything she thought she knew about how the world works into question.

She finds herself parked on the street across from Fletcher’s without consciously choosing to drive there. The burned-out husk of the club is still surrounded by police tape. What parts of the building the fire didn’t take have been ruined by the water it took to put out the blaze. She watches disconsolately as tourists stroll past, chattering and taking photos of the charred shell of the one place that ever truly felt like home.

Unmoored, Candy casts about for something, anything to ground her. She pulls out her phone, and after only a moment’s hesitation, taps on Chloe Decker’s name. She thanks forces she is no longer able to name when the detective answers on the second ring.

“Decker,” the woman says, sounding a bit out of breath. Candy hears a suspiciously familiar man’s voice saying something in an aggrieved tone in the background. “Hold on a sec,” Chloe says, and there’s the sound of shifting, fabric brushing against the phone, and footsteps as she walks briefly somewhere else.

“Hi, uh, it’s Candy. You probably know that, I guess, with caller ID and all,” Candy rambles and laughs nervously, but when the laugh escapes her mouth, it sounds more unhinged than she’d like.

“What did he do?” Chloe asks, voice carefully even. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

“Who, Michael? Nothing. I’m fine. I-I just saw…I kissed him, and his face…changed. Healed. Right in front of me. I don’t know what—it can’t be real, right? That’s…that’s insane,” Candy rambles, blinking back tears.

“Okay, go back to the beginning, and tell me what happened.” 

Candy latches on to Chloe’s calm, confident voice and takes a deep breath. She thinks back to the very beginning—this morning at the hospital? No, earlier, and earlier even. Really, she needs to tell it from the very start, when Michael arrived in Vegas. So she does. Chloe listens patiently as she recounts the turbulent events of the past few weeks. When Candy’s done, she feels drained, but relieved to know the burden of this experience isn’t something she has to carry alone.

“I know how it feels,” Chloe says once she’s done. “Like the world has gone crazy, or that you have, or both. It’s incredibly isolating.”

“Yeah,” Candy replies, wiping away the tears that have found their way down her cheeks while recounting the story.

“I’m here for you, okay?” Chloe says firmly. “You’re not crazy. And it’s difficult to believe, but it’s all true.”

“You’re telling me that you’re God’s girlfriend?” Candy says, hardly believing that she can say the words without laughing. 

“I try not to think about it like that too much. Because then I’d have to acknowledge all of the frankly idiotic things that I’ve seen ‘God’ do over the years.” She laughs, and Candy is surprised to find herself joining in. “I like to just think of him as a man who ended up in charge of a…very challenging family business.”

Candy sobers as she thinks about it more. “But Michael…you’re telling me everything he said, about the murders…”

“True,” Chloe replies, voice cold.

Candy grasps for words. “I just…he’s been so good to me. Yeah, he’s kind of a bastard, but I trust him. I like him.” I want him, she adds silently. Even now, she misses him. She wishes he were here to make his snarky, misanthropic quips. To support her with his quiet, casual competence, his cool, disaffected indifference to the entire world, belied only by the rare sad, longing look in eyes sometimes, a look reserved only for her.

“I can’t…well, I can’t speak to his motives or how reformed or not he is. He fooled me for a while, too. Even saved my life a few times. But he took my daughter’s father away from her, and almost orphaned her. And I can never forgive that. As far as I know, all the awful things he did were out of spite for Lucifer, not out of hatred toward the people he hurt. He just...didn’t seem to think human lives were worth caring about.”

Candy chews her lip, her mind racing to come up with excuses for why Michael might have done such terrible things. The same kinds of rationalizations that Michael himself warned her not to bother with the night of the fire. 

“I think he might hate himself as much as you hate him,” she says after a long silence.

“You might be right,” Chloe replies quietly. 

Guilty or not, remorseful or not, though—did it even really matter? Could angels be judged by the morality of petty, short-lived humans? What was her life to him, even? A blink, a second? If the afterlife exists, does death even really matter? Candy wipes her tear-streaked face. “Oh god, what am I wrapped up in? And can I even say ‘Oh god’ anymore?”

Chloe laughs. “Yeah, it’s been quite the transition period for me, too. You can’t imagine how much weirder it gets when you’re sleeping with God.” They both laugh for a long time, and it’s a relief to have someone else to share the absurdity of the situation with.

“But seriously,” Candy says soberly. “How do you handle it? Knowing that God and angels and—and Heaven and Hell—they’re all real?”

“Eventually, it kind of just becomes normal,” Chloe admits. “But honestly, there are times when I wonder if the whole thing is in my head. It helps that Lucifer is just so…real. He makes dumb mistakes all the time. He has all these issues with his family and his self-esteem. He’s not some mystical higher being, he’s just…a man who struggles the same way that we do.”

“I think I get that,” Candy says, thinking about Michael’s idiosyncratic miserliness, dry sense of humor, awful fashion sense, and his rare, prickly vulnerability. 

“At the end of the day, they’re people just like us. Just, you know, immortal, super-strong people with wings.”

“Wings, really? That’s actually not a myth?”

“Oh yeah, the wings are real.” Chloe’s tone suggests some kind of extensive, intimate personal experience with them. “Although Lucifer cut Michael’s off as punishment,” she adds as an afterthought.

“Oh,” Candy breathes, remembering the crescent-shaped wounds on Michael’s back that refused to heal. His grim acceptance of their presence, of the pain they caused him. Despite Chloe’s unflattering portrayal of him, despite the fact that Candy’s not sure that she should trust him—despite everything—her heart breaks for him. “Thank you...for listening. And helping me understand. And everything.” Candy says.

“It’s no problem at all. I’m happy to talk anytime you need to. And if you need more, uh, professional advice than I can provide, I can also give you the number for Lucifer’s therapist.”

Candy chuckles. “Yeah, I remember her. Dr. Linda, right? She’s aware of who—of what—he is?”

“Yeah! It was a shock to me, too. She’s also raising an angel baby, so...she’s been through this whole thing and then some,” Chloe says nonchalantly.

“An angel baby?” Candy’s jaw drops. “That’s even possible? Wait, is the baby Lucifer’s?”

“No, no! Thank g—no. The father is one of Lucifer’s other brothers, Amenadiel. Unclear whether it was a one-time fluke or a more persistent, uh, concern. I’ll just say that I’ve been very careful about birth control, and you might, um, want to keep that in mind as well.”

Candy takes a deep breath and stares up at the dome light on her car’s ceiling, wondering how she got herself here. Unemployed, broke, and contemplating buying a pregnancy test just in case she’s pregnant with an angel baby. 

“Got it,” she chokes out.

“Really, though, call or text me any time. I’m not working for the police anymore, so my hours are…flexible. And I also wanted to say…I’m sorry for how I treated you when we first met. I know now that you were just doing a favor for Lucifer, and I said some things that were…unkind.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Candy replies quickly, relieved at the change of subject. “I know he was trying to protect you, but it was a pretty shitty way to go about it. Your reaction was totally reasonable. And I’m completely used to people thinking I’m an idiot. That’s kind of what makes the act work.”

She hears Chloe snort on the other end of the line. “Well, for what it’s worth, as a former teen actress who’s taken her tits out on camera, I think you’re very talented.”

Candy laughs. “Right back at ya, Detective. I don’t know if it’s something you like to hear these days, but Hot Tub High School was very formative for me.”

“I hear it from Lucifer constantly, so I’m used to it.”

They say their goodbyes and hang up. Candy feels significantly better. It’s still a lot to take in, but somehow the knowledge that there are other people struggling with the same knowledge who are only a phone call away makes it a little less terrifying.

She gets out of her car and crosses the street. The sidewalk in front of the club is streaked in black and gray with the ash carried out by the firefighters’ water. The brick outer walls of the building remain standing, a shell protecting the hollowed-out ruin within. The neon sign that announced, “Fletcher’s” is smoke-blackened and slightly melted but still legible where it hangs mounted above the entrance.

Candy ducks under the police tape and walks into the building, attracting nothing but a few quizzical glances from tourists walking past. Inside, she picks her way carefully over piles of charred debris. Here and there, she sees something recognizable. A chair, or a spotlight, or a melted and deformed Boston shaker.

She can still make out the rise of the stage, an area where the wreckage sits a bit higher than everywhere else. She remembers a lifetime of performances, good and bad. Some of the greatest triumphs and disappointments of her life happened right here. She remembers standing just in front of it, fire extinguisher in hand, as the bar exploded behind her. Michael shielded her from the explosion with his body, taking the worst of the damage.

She traces a path she could have walked blindfolded once, from the stage to the hallway backstage. Here were the dressing rooms on the left, and there was her tiny office on the right. Once her father’s office, where he used to park her after school so she could do her homework while he managed the club, planning the night’s show or scratching away meticulously in his big ledger. Muttering to himself as he paid bills and paychecks. He’d had big dreams for this place, dreams that seemed to always get sacrificed on the altar of making ends meet.

Candy’s foot collides with something buried in the wet cinders, and she bends down to fish it out. It’s the spine of a book. She emits a gasp of recognition. Amazingly, improbably—miraculously, even—it’s what remains of her father’s ledger. A large portion of the thick book has been burned away, but when she pulls open the sodden pages, much of the old ink is still legible. She finds the singed end of the ribbon marking the latest entry and opens the volume. She can see where her chicken scratch switches over to Michael’s meticulous script.

Near the bottom, she sees where he’s recorded their shopping trip. “Awful mafia clothes,” he labeled the transaction. Just below it, one labeled “Self-esteem medallion” from Hassan’s Pawn Shop. She chuckles and swipes at the tears welling in her eyes with one ash-covered hand, cradling the ledger to her chest as she picks her way back out of the ashes.

The days crawl by in the hospital, and Candy fails to reappear. Michael’s body—contrary, irritating thing that it is—has decided to take this opportunity to begin healing in earnest. He regains the use of his right arm on the second day, though his fine motor control is still shot and he doesn’t have much there in the way of skin.

On the fifth day, he manages to take a few wobbling steps from his bed to the bathroom and finally is able to take a shit on his own again, which he counts as a major victory. The progress is slow—much slower than it should rightfully be—but it’s progress. Enough that the already-confounded Dr. Hilfiger is a manic, baffled wreck. She barrages him with tests and scans, asking him questions about his family history and then becoming enraged when he casually notes that his parents existed before time, so no, he has no idea whether or not he even has grandparents, much less if they have a history of genetic disorders or rare blood diseases.

He fills his time watching Mexican telenovelas on the tiny television mounted in the corner of his room. One day, he notices his room’s usual cleaner—Daniela, a tiny, deeply tanned middle-aged woman—unsubtly watching the TV too as she mops his floor.

“Do you know this show?” he asks.

“Sí!” she replies, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s my favorite.”

“Can you please explain what exactly is going on with Paola and Paulina?”

“Oh!” she exclaims, grinning, and sits down on the edge of her bed. “They’re identical twins, separated at birth! Paola blackmailed Paulina and forced her to switch lives so that Paola could leave her husband and run off with her lover. But in the meantime, Paulina is falling in love with Paola’s husband!” Daniela sighs. “It’s so romantic.”

Michael harrumphs. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

He doesn’t comment when Daniela relocates to the chair beside his bed and begins watching the television show raptly. It’s convenient for him to be able to ask her questions about the backstory he missed whenever something doesn’t make sense, which is often. She gives long, rambling descriptions of the melodramatic and unrealistic events of previous episodes, adding her own commentary on top. Typically decrying the acts of the villainous Paola and fawning over Paulina’s budding romance.

She’s not the woman Michael wishes were sitting in that chair, but her chatter, in addition to the soap opera on the TV screen, makes it a bit easier to drown out the insidious ongoing commentary in his head. When the episode ends and Daniela leaves to do her work elsewhere, he finds himself imagining what Candy is doing now. Most likely, she dyed her hair, packed her bags, and left town, if she has any sense at all. Maybe she pulled a Full Chloe and fled to Rome to get the dubious advice of the Catholic Church. Maybe she thinks she’s gone mad and checked herself into a mental institution. Maybe Junior and his cronies caught her on her way out of town and一

“Shut up,” he hisses, gritting his teeth. 

Are you happy now? She believes you, about everything. She took you for her word when you told her you’re a cold-blooded killer and she’s never going to speak to you again. You fucked it up, buddy, the voice in his head crows in vicious, malevolent delight. Why don’t you pack it up and head to some other city where you can ruin another human’s life, since apparently that is the only thing you’re good at一

“Enough,” he snaps. Outside the observation window, a passing doctor looks up from a chart, startled.

Eventually, a picture forms in his brain. Candy has simply decided to excise him from her life. It’s smart and eminently practical, like her. Vegas is her city, so there’s no reason for her to leave. He is the interloper, the tourist. She won’t contact him again. She’ll do what needs to be done to be compensated for the destruction of her club. She’ll rebuild, better than before. Hire back her faithful staff. Buy a new set of lovely, form-fitting dresses. She’ll meet someone else. Someone who shares her interests, but can balance out her weak points. Together, they’ll make Fletcher’s thrive, make it all the things Candy dreams it could be. And in a few short decades, she’ll die in her bed, guiltless, at a respectable old age, and make her way to her eternal reward in the Silver City.

And Michael, he’ll be the same. Trapped here on this slowly boiling planet, doing what he must to scrape by. Hounded by pain and regret. Alone as the world dies around him. Alone, alone, alone.

His mouth is dry, and he can feel his heart beating rapidly against his chest, painfully, like it’s trying to break out of his chest. He sucks in air, but can’t seem to fully catch his breath. Beside him, his heart monitor beeps a stuttering allegro. He knows he can’t die, but it feels like he is. He knows enough about fear to read the signs in himself that he so often sees in others. 

He untangles his feet from his sheets and swings them over the side of the bed, pausing only to rip off his heart monitor and pull out his IV line. His legs are still as weak and wobbly as a newborn foal’s as he staggers to the small bathroom adjoining his room. He turns on the cold water in the sink full-blast and splashes his face with it. After a few minutes, he feels the panic slowly begin to subside, and he braces himself against the sink, panting, and regards himself in the mirror. 

His face has healed, but the scar Lucifer gave him remains. His hair hangs lank and messy over his forehead. There are heavy, dark bags beneath his eyes, and his long stubble gives him a haggard, hunted look. His right side is still a mess of twisted, burned skin that meets the healed skin on his left side in a tangle of angry red whorls and tendrils. 

“Behold, an angel of the Lord,” he mutters.

Candy waits a week before visiting Michael again. She uses almost every minute of it fretting about what she should say, what she should do. How the conversation will go. She has convinced herself that she should make a clean break. She’s just a showgirl, after all. And an unsuccessful one at that. She lies and cheats and steals just to make ends meet. She’s about as far from holy as a woman can get. So who is she to command the time or attention of a celestial being? Why in the world would he choose to spend time with her when he could simply reveal himself to the greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers in the world? He could spill all his troubling cosmic truths to someone who can do something with them. Use them to elevate humanity, to align all religions, to bring world peace.

Someone smarter than her could reconcile the ethics of his past actions in the light of the existence of an immortal soul. They could figure out what, if anything, a being like him would have to do to be reformed or make amends for his actions. They could look at him objectively and fairly. Figure out how to use his abilities for the good of mankind.

It’s what’s right, she thinks. It doesn’t make her particularly happy, but she can’t see how she could possibly ask him to stay with her and help her solve her small, petty problems. No matter how much she wants to. The prospect of trying to work out a settlement with the Riccis by herself is intimidating to an impossible degree. She has the gift of gab, but she’s terrible with numbers. She has endless ideas but always struggles to see the path between dreaming about them and making them happen. It all seemed so much simpler with him there.

But she’s resolute. She’s going to say goodbye, firmly. Finally. She strides down the hall of the burn unit, visitor’s badge bouncing against her chest. Knocks briefly on the door to his room and opens it to find一

—His bed is empty. She blinks at it, mouth hanging open, her well-practiced speech abruptly forgotten. The bedding is kicked aside, and the mattress still shows the depression where a body recently occupied it. But Michael is nowhere to be seen. 

Suddenly, there’s the sound of running water, then movement in the bathroom to her left, and the door opens, and then Michael is there, standing on his own two relatively undamaged feet in nothing but a hospital gown. His hair is damp and half-plastered to his forehead. She gapes up at him. She’d forgotten how tall he was. When he was bedridden, he’d been manageable. Helpless. Unintimidating. But now, he looms over her, broad and powerful and every bit the image of one of God’s own sons. 

He stares back at her like a deer in headlights. “Candy,” he chokes out after a long moment.

“Hi, Michael,” she replies, voice much smaller and meeker than she’d like.

“What一” he begins, then clears his throat. “What are you doing here?”

“I—well, I thought we should talk.”

“What is there left to say?” he asks, cocking his head, his eyes piercing and black.

Candy’s mouth opens and closes several times as she tries to find the right words, tries to reach for her carefully rehearsed monologue. But what she says instead is一

“I miss you.”

Michael blinks at her, then one corner of his mouth quirks up in a look of puzzled disbelief. “No you don’t,” he says.

“Yes, I do,” she insists.

“Don’t worry, you’re in no danger from me. I’m not going to draw out your fears and use them against you, or whatever you’ve heard. You don’t need to lie.”

“I’m not lying,” she says, increasingly incensed, baffled that he wants to argue with her about this.

“Yes, you are,” he retorts, almost angrily. “No one misses me.”

“Well, I do!” Candy shouts.

He stares at her, taken aback.

“Now sit down,” she commands, and the archangel Michael, commander of the heavenly host, sits obediently on the edge of his bed.

She finds herself pacing on the squeaky linoleum before him. All her carefully thought-through rationales seem to crumble apart when confronted by the sight of him sitting there, waiting passively with bated breath, his eyes gone soft and wistful as they track her movement back and forth in front of him.

“You know, I had this speech all figured out,” she says eventually.

“Then say it to me.”

“I can’t, because you’re—because I don’t want to,” she admits. 

“You don’t want to what?”

“I don’t want to tell you to go.”

He looks puzzled. “It’s the only logical thing to tell me.”

“I know.”

“Then say it.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I know.”

“I feel like we’re going around in circles here.”

Candy laughs, scrubbing her face with her hands. “I’ve never been the most rational person when it comes to relationships.”

He opens his mouth like he’s about to make another quip, so she silences him by cradling his jaw in both hands, tilting his face up, and kissing him. He melts beneath her, making a single tiny, desperate noise into her mouth. His large hands come up to clutch her hips. She rakes her hands through his soft hair, stroking his head as her lips break away from his. He nuzzles into the curve of her throat, breathing in heavy, trembling gusts, and she clasps him to her.

“I don’t want you to go because I want you to stay with me,” she says softly. “I want to be with you.”

“You know I’m a murderer.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m not human.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll look the same as I do today when you’re an old woman.”

“And people will think I’m either extremely rich or incredibly good in bed,” Candy jokes.

“You’re crazy,” Michael marvels in disbelief.

“Maybe,” she says, leaning down to kiss him again. He wraps his arms around her and kisses her like it’s the last time.

Candy leaves soon after that with a final peck on the lips and an exhortation to finish healing so that he can get out of the hospital, finally. He jokes that it’s not any worse than his shitty motel room. She laughs and says that it’s much worse than her apartment.

He swallows the lump in his throat and smiles at her as she glides back out into the hallway and out of sight. Resolved, he waits several minutes for her to make it out of the hospital, and then climbs to his feet again. His balance steadies as he walks further, out of his hospital room and into the hallway.

“Hey!” Manny calls, looking up sharply from his post at the nurse’s station as Michael trudges past. “Mr. Michael! You need to be in your bed! Come back here!”

Michael continues on, ignoring the nurse’s increasingly insistent commands. When Manny tries to stop him physically, he shrugs the smaller human’s grip off with ease. Michael eventually locates one of the physician lounges, which is adjoined by a locker room with showers. He ignores the offended squawking of the doctors in the lounge and moves past them. He roots through the laundry bin in the locker room until he finds a set of scrubs that fits him and pulls them on, discarding his hospital gown.

He leaves through the front door of the hospital, barefoot and single-minded, ignoring the leaden weight in his chest as he turns towards the east and begins to walk away from the city of Las Vegas.

Chapter Text

Lucifer finds his twin brother sitting on the edge of the Hoover Dam, oddly enough, wearing nothing but a set of green hospital scrubs. His hair is a mess, whipped about by the desert wind rushing over the lip of the dam, and his beard is unkempt and longer than Lucifer would ever dream of allowing his own to get. Despite it all, his twin looks leaps and bounds better than he did the last time Lucifer saw him. His burns are almost completely healed. It’s the early hours of the morning, and the stars have just begun to fade with the onset of dawn.

“If you’re going to jump, let me know first so I can take a video,” Lucifer calls to him.

“Leave me alone,” Michael groans.

“I got quite an interesting phone call from Candy just now,” Lucifer remarks, putting his hands in his pockets and strolling towards the concrete balustrade where his twin sits. “Apparently you disappeared from the hospital. Gave at least one nurse a real scare in the process. They also were quite insistent that she agree to be the guarantor for your hospital account. You racked up a hefty sum during your little spate of vulnerability. You know, I think I’m pretty powerful these days, but I still have nothing on American medical debt collectors.”

Michael glances up at him sharply. “You won’t一”

“It’s all paid for,” Lucifer reassures him. “I owed Candy far more than that for taking you on.”

Michael relaxes slightly, returning his gaze to the scenery before him.

Lucifer regards his twin for a long moment, allowing his omniscience the slightest free reign so he can take a peek at Michael’s thoughts. It’s a bit like dipping one’s hand into a bucket of snakes, but in many ways it’s surprisingly familiar in there.

“You know, over the eons in Hell, I learned quite a bit about fear,” Lucifer begins after some thought, lowering himself to sit on the concrete beside Michael, several hundred feet of empty air between his dangling Louboutins and the Colorado River far below.

Michael doesn’t respond, but his head turns fractionally toward his twin, just enough that Lucifer knows he’s paying attention.

“Handy thing, fear. It can be quite irrational, of course. Fear of the dark, or insects, or clowns, or what have you. Things that aren’t true dangers, most of the time. Very convenient when it comes to devising tortures. Sometimes the tiniest, most harmless things could send souls into paroxysms of terror. Shrieking, cowering, trembling fear.

“But the most insidious form of fear isn’t the kind that makes one scream or cower. It’s the utterly mundane things—fear of abandonment, or vulnerability, or the unknown. Fears that keep mortals from pursuing their desires. That keep them in bad situations. That keep them from living life to the fullest. Fears that create regret and guilt.”

“Yes, and?” Michael snaps, impatient. “Did you come all this way just to tell me what I already know?”

“I’m more afraid these days than I’ve ever been,” Lucifer says, idly tossing a pebble into the void in front of them.

Michael glances at him sharply. 

“I’m afraid for Chloe and Trixie and Miss Lopez. Doctor Linda and Amenadiel and Charlie. Candy, too. Every person I hold dear. That they might be hurt. That they’ll need something that I don’t know how to give them. That they’ll become ill and suffer. That they’ll die plagued with guilt and end up downstairs.”

“I thought you had decided that we non-deities were meant to make each other suffer,” Michael says bitterly.

“I’m not afraid for them as God.” Lucifer chuckles darkly. “Believe me, all my job-related anxieties are an entirely different beast. My point is just that it’s a third kind of fear, a fear that comes from wanting to protect them, from wanting them to be happy. It’s a selfless kind of fear. The kind that makes people do stupid, brave things. Things that trade one’s own happiness or well being for those of someone else. Entirely the opposite of the anxieties you so love to exploit.”

“What’s your point?” Michael asks. He feels weary, feels every moment of his astronomical age, and so utterly, abjectly alone. He misses Father and Mother, who left without so much as a farewell for him. Misses the siblings who once loved him, and whom he once loved. And most of all, he misses Candy. His longing for her is a sharp blade in his chest, softened only by the thought of her finding happiness without him, with some human who could give her what she deserves.

Lucifer slaps him jovially between his shoulder blades and climbs to his feet again. “Just that these look good on your back again.”

Michael jerks forward with the force of the slap, and blinks as he processes what Lucifer said. He’s felt different since he left the hospital, but he figured it was just the sensation of his burns healing and the burden of that pain lifting off of him. But now that he reaches for them一

His wings unfurl smoothly and symmetrically, all sleek and straight charcoal-hued feathers that look better than they have since Lucifer fell. Michael’s jaw drops as he looks from left to right, taking them in. He scrambles to his feet and turns to face his twin, who stands on the pavement with his hands in his pockets, watching him with one brow cocked.

“Did you一?” Michael stammers.

“Nope. All you, brother. If it had been up to me, I’d have let you lie around like a burnt sparerib for a while longer. But I do have a job offer for you if you’re interested, now that you’re capable of it.”

Michael blinks, cocking his head quizzically.

“As I mentioned, the paperwork required to run the universe is atrocious, and it’s really cutting into my personal time,” Lucifer continues. “I could certainly do with an egg-headed lackey with experience to handle it.”

“You’re offering me my old job back?” Michael asks, baffled at the absurdity of the reversal.

“Exactly.” Lucifer extends a hand. “What do you say?”

Michael’s brow furrows, and he stares at Lucifer’s hand, but doesn’t take it. “What’s the catch?” he asks.

“No catch. You simply return to Heaven, do your work, keep your head down, and don’t make any trouble. No more plotting to take the throne, and no more interference in human affairs. If you do, I’ll know.” Lucifer taps his temple and gives Michael a pointed look.

Michael’s head turns away from the growing light of dawn, towards the rugged cliffs to the west, towards her, and swallows thickly. He pauses to think a moment before declaring, “I’ll do it, but I have conditions.”

Lucifer gives an exasperated sigh. “I don’t see that you’re in much of a position to negotiate, but go ahead.”

“You’ll fund Candy’s new club, and any expansion of it that she wants. No strings attached. No favors to be called in at a later date.”

“Fine by me. I was already planning to, anyway.”

“And you’ll have Gabriel keep watch over her, at least until it’s clear that the Riccis are no longer a threat.”

“Ah, well I don’t think that will be possible. Gabriel has a very useful and unique set of powers. Not sure I could do without them for that long.”

Michael curses quietly, casting about for another option. “Jophiel, then. As long as you tell him it’s not for me, he should be happy watching her…you could even guarantee him unlimited access to the club after it opens.”

Lucifer pauses, contemplating this for a moment. “Deal,” he says eventually, extending his hand again. Michael takes it this time, hissing a little as his twin squeezes his still-tender burns. Lucifer smiles a little vindictively, nods, and disappears with a flap of white feathers. 

After one last look towards Las Vegas, Michael follows.

Michael is gone. Gone from the hospital, gone from the city, gone from the country, gone from the entire planet. 

Lucifer tells her as much, the day after she called him in a panic and relayed what the hospital told her. God sits at her kitchen table, calmly drinking her cheap coffee, and informs her that his brother has accepted a job offer back in Heaven.

“He just…left me?” she asks, dazed.

Lucifer’s eyes soften in sympathy. “Not without me having to throw in some sweeteners, believe me.”

Candy’s throat tightens. “What kind of incentive did he need?”

Lucifer pulls a small, folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and places it on the table between them. “This, primarily.”

Candy unfolds the paper. It’s a check, she realizes, from Lucifer. When she reads the amount, her eyes go wide. 

“For your new club,” Lucifer says encouragingly. “From what I hear, it’s supposed to be an immersive, multichannel entertainment experience.”

Tears well in Candy’s eyes. “We were supposed to do it together,” she whispers.

“What, with Michael? Believe me, he would have made it far too dull and practical! You want this to be a success, right? Consider me your silent partner and consultant on all things fun!” Lucifer enthuses, grinning. When Candy continues to stare down morosely at the check and fails to respond in kind, his smile fades. “Candy?”

“Thank you so much for this, Lucifer,” she says. “It’s…incredibly generous. If I didn’t happen to know that you have the ability to make money from nothing, I’d probably turn it down.”

“Excuse me! This money was earned! Via several hundred years of compounded interest and real estate investment, but earned nonetheless.”

Candy finally laughs at that, though the moment of mirth quickly passes and is replaced by a morose frown.

“What can I do to bring my Cotton Candy back to her cheery self?” Lucifer asks gently.

“Tell him you don’t need him in Heaven. Tell him to come back,” she says in a small voice.

“Darling, I’m afraid he chose to leave Las Vegas before I even spoke to him. And I’m sure you know he did it out of concern for you. Believe me, you don’t want to have to deal with celestial nonsense, much less all of Michael’s baggage. There are millions of worthy humans out there. You’re much better off with one of them. One who isn’t a murderous, devious, fashion-blind curmudgeon.”

“I’ve spent years dating people who were supposedly ‘worthy,’ or ‘good for me,’” Candy explodes. “Everyone leaves me! Everyone! I’m never enough for them! Or I’m too much! Or I ‘deserve better!’ For once, I just want to be able to get what I want! Be with who I want!” She sighs, deflating. “That’s not so much to ask, is it?”

“Not at all,” Lucifer replies, smiling sadly. 

“Chloe was willing to deal with all your ‘celestial nonsense,’ wasn’t she?”

“So it seems, but honestly, every day I worry she’ll come to her senses and finally leave me.”

Candy squeezes his hand where it rests on the table between them. “She loves you. If she’s stuck with you all this time, through all you two have endured, she’s with you to the end. Believe me.”

“I certainly hope so.” Lucifer clears his throat and blinks. “Here I thought I was supposed to be here to comfort you!”

“You’ve done a pretty shitty job so far.”

“I have, haven’t I?” He looks at her, contemplative. “Listen, I’ll make you one last deal.”

“I’m listening.”

“If Michael decides he wants to return to Earth, I’ll do nothing to stand in his way. Even though it’ll mean the tedious work of training someone else to do his job.”

“But you won’t tell him to come back,” Candy says bitterly.

“Honestly, I agree with him. You’re far better off with someone else. And it’s not just a celestial and human thing, since obviously I’m in no position to cast stones. I don’t trust him not to hurt you.”

“He’s hurting me right now,” Candy counters. 

“I suppose he is,” Lucifer replies with a sigh. “A very sad middle-aged murder suspect once told me, ‘You don’t always get to pick who you fall in love with.’ The heart can make some very unfortunate choices, can’t it?”

She nods morosely. When she looks up, Lucifer is gone.

The process of rebuilding the club is painfully slow, even with Lucifer’s considerable finances driving it. First they have to wait for the police and fire department to complete their investigation, then the wreckage of the old club must be cleared and hauled away. 

The police tell her they’re pursuing criminal charges against Carlo Jr. for the destruction of the club, though Michael’s disappearance has thrown a wrench into their case, since his presence was the lynchpin of motive that connected the would-be mobster to the arson itself. Gabriel’s helpfully-planted “evidence” only indicates that he was in the alley at some point, not that he set the fire, after all. Detective Jones calls her one afternoon and asks if she’d be willing to testify in Michael’s stead—to confirm that Junior had a motive to try to kill Michael. It’d be a major victory, she says, if they could get a crime lord’s son convicted for first-degree arson and attempted murder. Candy tells her she’s not sure, and after a pregnant pause, Jones says she understands.

Meanwhile, Candy meets with a parade of architects and construction companies. She sits alone across from each of them inside their fancy offices and imagines Michael beside her, whispering comments in her ear and poking fun at the people she meets. She imagines clasping his hand beneath the table, just like she did that night at the dinner. Imagines drawing strength from him even as she lends him her own.

Let me know when he shows back up married to some random woman, Chloe texts her after Candy tells her what happens.

Ha-ha, Candy replies.

In the evening, she de-stresses with more wine than she really should drink, still not used to how quiet and early her nights have become. She decides she probably needs to get used to it, considering that at this rate, she’s going to spend her entire life alone. One night, after a particularly fraught afternoon arguing with her general contractor over materials and finishes, she takes her big glass of Syrah into the bathroom and draws a hot bath, lighting candles and turning off the harsh overhead lights as she ties up her hair and slips into the water.

She sighs and closes her eyes, breathing in lavender-scented steam and relaxing bonelessly into the heat, feeling her tense muscles slowly unwind. In the dim, flickering candlelight, floating almost weightless in the bath’s warm embrace, it’s easy to let her mind wander and fantasize. She imagines a firm, broad chest behind her back instead of the hard plastic of the tub. Muscular arms coming up around her and skimming up her legs, over her belly, grazing her breasts, sliding upward to gently frame her neck. She lets her own hands trace the same path, then back downwards.

She imagines a stubbled cheek pressing against her head and breath tickling into her ear—a voice whispering her name. Fire kindles between her legs, and she can feel his equal desire rising against the small of her back, but there is nothing hurried here, no rush to have it over with quickly. His hand slides up the inside of her thigh, and she spreads her legs as much as the tub will allow, begging him wordlessly to touch her there. He teases for a moment, stroking the soft skin just below the crease of her thigh, until she whimpers in protest. His chuckle rumbles through her, and he finally strokes her, two fingers sliding along her seam, torturously slow and yet so good.

His other hand clasps her breast, squeezing gently, thumb flicking slowly back and forth across her nipple. She pants, hips rocking against his hand for more friction, more speed. He slips two fingers inside of her and lets her grind against the heel of his palm, moving ceaselessly and relentlessly. She whimpers, and he draws his fingers back out to work rapidly against her clit, and suddenly she’s peaking, pleasure rushing through her, a strangled cry escaping her throat that sounds a bit like, “Michael!”

She comes back to reality slowly, blinking her eyes open and remembering the truth of the matter. Michael is somewhere beyond human reckoning, and she’s alone.

Michael’s job in Heaven was never exactly what he’d call a barrel of laughs, but there was a certain satisfaction to bringing order to the universe’s many concerns and problems.

He kept track of the Silver City’s human population, as he had since Eve first crossed the threshold and stepped, doe-eyed, into paradise. He triaged requests and intel coming from other angels with duties that took them to every far-flung inch of the universe, collecting information into tidy reports, annotated with his commentary on validity of other angels’ opinions and the importance and urgency of their requests. And for matters in need of observation that didn’t fall under another angel’s purview, he sat at Father’s massive orrery and directed its all-seeing eye to whatever corner of creation needed watching. In recent years, that had mostly consisted of him obsessively spying on Lucifer as he cavorted on Earth with his little human playthings, consumed by bitterness and envy.

His siblings believed that he held much more power than he actually did, if only because they spoke to him when they had something to say to God. Michael controlled the flow of information, to an extent, but it was a convenience to Father, not a necessity. Naturally, God could see for himself what was happening in his universe. And there was only one being with the power to actually make much of anything happen, and that was never Michael.

Doing the job for Lucifer has a different flavor to it, to say the least. With Father, he spent enormous amounts of time choosing precisely the correct words to communicate problems in such a way that did not imply that God was in any way at fault or that his creation was less than perfect. He surrounded every sentence in flowery praise and made sure each report was immaculate in every way. With Lucifer, he finds himself often simply scrawling things like, “Arariel’s too obsessed with fish and their ‘feelings;’ disregard” or “Fucking worthless pulsars are breaking down again.” When the workload is particularly heavy, he slips into a shorthand they used to use back when they were young, trusting that Lucifer can interpret what he writes.

Lucifer himself is rarely in his office at the top of the tower above Michael’s desk. He still far prefers to be on Earth with his little human family, and Michael can no longer say that he blames him. When the new God does come by, he simply sweeps the stack of pending reports on Michael’s desk into his arms, gives him a cool nod, and retreats to his office. More often than not, he follows Michael’s recommendations, but every once in a while, he makes a different decision, often enough that Michael knows he’s actually reading the reports, which is a surprise. Lucifer has never been one for doing his homework, as it were, but he seems to be taking godhood seriously.

In the rare moments when Michael has a moment or two free, he directs the orrery to focus in on Las Vegas, on a small apartment in a high-rise a few blocks off the Strip. Catching sight of her, even like this, even from across dimensions, is like a healing balm. Like a deep drink of cool water after weeks wandering in the desert. Her figure glows and shimmers in the mystical light of the orrery as she goes about her daily life. Eating dinner, or exercising, or watching television, or overseeing the planning for her new club, or—in one particularly memorable and stirring instance—taking a bath, her head thrown back and one hand working between her legs.

Aside from when she’s working on the club’s reconstruction, she’s usually alone. Michael is both disappointed and selfishly pleased to see it. While he wants her to find happiness without him, the thought of her in the arms of some idiotic human makes him sick to his stomach. 

He also keeps an eye on Jophiel, who’s doing an absolutely awful job as her guardian. Las Vegas provides too many distractions—specifically, too many parties brimming with alcohol, drugs, and beautiful women—for him to effectively maintain his watch. For a few hours each day, he’ll perch outside Candy’s window and look in at her as she goes about her routine, but he soon grows bored and wanders off to find another nightclub to close out. Michael writes several strongly-worded memos to his twin about his, but as far as he can tell, they go largely ignored.

One day, he’s watching Candy curl her hair—head propped up on one elbow, and his nose so close to her image in the orrery that it’s almost touching her—when Lucifer breezes in. Michael jumps, fumbling for the control to return the device to its default view of the swirling enormity of the universe.

“You’re becoming quite the peeping Tom, brother,” Lucifer says, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

“That’s not what—I’m just keeping an eye on her since Jophiel isn’t,” Michael says, indignant, feeling his face heat.

“As long as you’re doing your job and cleaning up after you polish the ol’ knob, it’s fine,” Lucifer replies magnanimously. “Just avoid getting anything on the paperwork.”

“I haven’t一” Michael huffs, sure he’s beet-red now. He certainly has thought about it…

“What’s dear Candy up to these days, anyway?” Lucifer wonders, cutting him off before Michael can protest further. He waves his hand at the orrery and it zooms back in to Candy’s apartment. She’s applying lipstick, mouth stretched wide. She presses her lips together briefly and smiles at herself in the mirror for a moment, and then her face falls. Her shoulders rise and fall in a deep sigh.

“She looks sad,” Lucifer muses.

“Do you think so?” Michael asks, trying to keep the note of idiotic hope out of his voice.

“Oh, I know so,” Lucifer replies, gathering up the stack of new reports on Michael’s desk.

“Is she一” Michael swallows with difficulty. “Is she alright, though?”

“Oh, she’s strong enough to endure just about anything, I imagine.”

“She is,” Michael agrees proudly.

“Doesn’t mean she should have to, though.” Lucifer gives him a meaningful look and climbs the staircase leading to his private office.

Michael blinks at that, confused, mulling over Lucifer’s words. He supported Michael leaving her to her own devices, didn’t he? Letting her live her life like a normal mortal, without the burden of all of Michael’s bullshit? It was the right decision, wasn’t it? One of the few selfless things Michael has done in his long life. At least, it felt selfless. It felt like hurting himself to ensure her happiness. But if she was unhappy, too, then一

Through the tinny distortion of the orrery comes the sound of a door banging open. There, only a few yards away from where Candy stands in her bathroom, is little Donny Ricci, the low-ranking cousin of a cousin whose wrist Michael broke what feels like an eternity ago. On one of his hands is a black plastic medical brace. In the other is a cold black pistol, its handle and trigger taped in classic mafia style. 

Horrified, Michael’s eyes dart to Jophiel’s usual perch outside the window. His idiotic party boy of a brother is nowhere to be found.

“Candy!” Donny Ricci calls. “You here? Got a message for you from Don Carlo.”

In the bathroom, Candy freezes, her eyes going wide. Time seems to slow.

Michael flies like he’s never flown before.

Chapter Text

“Candy! You here? Got a message for you from Don Carlo.”

Candy freezes, the wand of her mascara hovering one trembling inch away from her eye. The voice is unmistakable. Donny Ricci had been in charge of collecting loan payments and protection money from her for the Riccis for years. On top of that, he added more than his fair share of indiscriminate terrorizing of both Candy’s staff and Candy herself. 

Her eyes dart around her bathroom, looking for a weapon or some way out and coming up terrifyingly short. Her apartment is barely more than a living room, galley kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. From the sound of it, Donny is in the entryway part of the living room, moving towards her. She has a baseball bat in her bedroom closet, but that will require her to dart across the hallway to her bedroom in full view of the living room.

She turns off the bathroom light and slowly eases the door open, taking care not to let the latch make a noise, cursing herself for letting her guard down again. Apparently having multiple angels and even God himself in her corner wasn’t enough to keep her safe from old-fashioned mob thugs.

Taking care to move slowly, she peeks around the edge of the door. At the end of the hallway, she sees Donny moving around the living room, poking into corners and opening drawers, a gun in hand. She suppresses a gasp, her heart beating wildly. She won’t have more than one shot at this. She waits until he turns so that his back is turned fully towards her and leaps across the hallway and through her open bedroom door. 

“Candy?” he calls. “I know you’re here somewhere, darlin’. I’m not gonna hurt ya! I just wanna talk.”

Candy whips open the door to her closet and fights her way through the clothing on hangers until she reaches the back of the small compartment. There, she fumbles towards the corner until she finds the smooth, cool handle of the baseball bat. With her other hand, she pulls the door of the closet closed behind her.

She waits, bat gripped in both sweaty hands, concealed by a wall of dresses, trying to breathe as quietly as she can. She hears the telltale creaking of the floorboards next to her bed and the quiet shushing of fabric moving as Donny walks through the room.

“Candyyyy,” he calls, just outside the closet. Suddenly, there’s a burst of light as he yanks the door open. Candy leaps forward through the clothes with a scream and swings the bat at his head with all her strength.

It collides with the side of his head with an audible thwack, and he reels back but doesn’t fall. 

“You dumb fucking cunt!” he cries, clutching the side of his head with one hand and raising his gun with the other. Candy swings the bat back in the other direction and catches him in the ribs, which seems to knock the wind out of him. Then she pushes past him and makes a break towards the bedroom door. She almost thinks she’s made it free when he hits her in a full tackle, bringing her crashing down onto the carpeted hallway floor.

She struggles to wiggle forward, but he catches her wrists and flips her, pinning her to the floor, facing upwards towards him so she can see her death coming head on. He reaches behind him with one hand and comes back with his gun once again. He sits up on his knees, straddling her, and points the gun at her forehead.

“Don Carlo doesn’t take kindly to rats who testify against his family,” he says, mouth twisted in cruel satisfaction.

Candy closes her eyes, and waits for death.

But instead of the expected gunshot, she feels a shadow fall across her face. She opens her eyes again, and Donny is looking up at something behind her, face white with terror. He points the gun upwards and fires wildly, until a hand darts out and snatches it from his grasp. There’s a loud crack, and two heavy objects fall to the floor beside her—two halves of his gun, she realizes. Candy tilts her head backwards and sees a figure standing at the end of the hallway, silhouetted in the light from her living room, two massive black wings extending on either side of him.

“Michael?” she whispers.

And then Donny is scrambling to his feet and leaping towards the figure, whether to try to attack him or make a break for the front door, Candy isn’t sure. Michael pivots out of his path effortlessly and strikes faster than a viper, driving the side of his hand into Donny’s windpipe. The button man staggers forward into the living room, clutching at his throat.

Michael extends a hand to her and helps her to her feet. “Are you okay?” he asks, concerned eyes raking up and down her body, looking for damage.

“Michael, your wings—” she stammers, gazing in awe at the two otherworldly appendages looming on either side of him.

He smiles and looks like he’s about to say something when they hear the sound of Donny fumbling at the front door behind them.

“Hold that thought,” Michael says, his smile sharpening into something almost feral. He turns and strides over to the mobster, who’s still clutching at his throat, breathing in loud, painful wheezes. He grabs Donny by the back of his leather jacket and flings him bodily across the room. The man collides painfully with the couch, so hard that it tumbles over backwards. Michael stalks after him, looming over Donny as he cowers on the floor, both hands raised as if to fend off the quite literal avenging angel. Michael crouches and takes both of Donny’s arms by the wrists, lifting the man easily until his back hovers above the floor and his legs scrabble fruitlessly for purchase against the carpeting.

“It looks like the lesson I taught you last time didn’t stick,” Michael hisses, tearing off the wrist brace on Donny’s left arm with ease. He grips the injured wrist, and with a twitch of his fingers and sickening crack that makes Donny emit a hideous, hoarse scream, he breaks it again. “And for good measure…” Michael quickly does the same thing to the other wrist.

Donny screams again, trailing off gradually into a tearful wailing. He falls heavily back onto the floor, both broken wrists held close to his chest as he cries. “Jesus Christ, help me, God forgive me, please. Oh, Holy Mother Mary一”

“Enough of that,” Michael says shortly. He stands again, draws his leg back, and delivers a short, brutal kick to the side of Donny’s head, almost precisely where Candy hit him. Donny falls silent and limp onto the floor, unconscious.

Michael turns back to Candy, and when he sees the expression on her face, his own satisfied smile fades and his wings lower expressively. He almost has the look of a schoolboy expecting to be chastised. Candy realizes her mouth is hanging open. She closes it and swallows, slowly picking her way towards him across the chaotic disarray of her living room. 

He waits for her, arms hanging at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling anxiously, wings folded tightly to his back and rising and falling slightly with his breathing. He’s wearing strange clothes, not like any kind of fashion she’s seen before, but somehow oddly similar to his standard wardrobe: a dark gray tunic with a high collar made out of some kind of soft, velvety fabric, belted at his waist, topped with an earthy brown rough-spun mantle that extends down to mid-thigh. His legs are covered by loose, leather-looking leggings that he wears tucked into high boots. With his unearthly wings and unfamiliar clothing, he’s both alien and heartbreakingly familiar at the same time.

She comes to a stop in front of him and stares up at his face, which is creased in a contrite expression.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make sure you had better protection,” he blurts. “I knew Jophiel didn’t have the focus to keep an eye on you all the time. I should have insisted that Lucifer keep Gabriel on it and一”

She raises her hand to his face, tracing his jawline, reassuring herself that he’s real. And then she winds up and slaps him with all her strength.

“Ow!” he cries, clutching his cheek. 

“Never do that to me again!” She snaps, shaking her index finger threateningly at him. “When you leave, you say goodbye!”

He opens his mouth to reply, but Candy stops him with a kiss, cupping his face in both hands. He reacts all at once, pressing his lips back against hers fiercely, his hands coming up to thread through her hair. She grips the lapels of his strange heavenly coat and anchors herself to him, reassuring herself that he won’t be able to disappear on her.

“I’ll never leave without saying goodbye again,” he pants against her lips when they finally break apart.

“Damn straight,” she says, shaking with the force of the adrenaline, relief, and joy running through her. He regards her for a moment and then cautiously brings his arms around her, tucking her trembling frame against him.  She responds in kind, wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face against his chest. The feathers at his back are silky and soft where they brush against her arms, and she’s struck by the strangeness of this all. After a moment, his great dark wings, too, wrap around her, cocooning them in quiet solitude.

“Please don’t leave again,” she whispers against his chest.

She hears him swallow with some difficulty. “I wanted—I was trying to do what was best for you.”

She scoffs and tilts her head up to look at him. “Let me decide what’s best for me,” she says. “Do you want to be with me?”

He looks at her incredulously. “Of course.”

“And I want to be with you. That’s enough.”

“But I don’t deserve...any of this.” He gestures broadly at her and their surroundings.

“In my experience, fate doesn’t really care about what we deserve or not. I think we’re all best off just...grabbing as much happiness we can.”

He stares down at her, a hint of a mischievous smile playing around his lips. “And anyone who has a problem with it can go fuck themselves?”

“Exactly.”

The smile grows into a grin, and suddenly he’s picking her up and spinning her. She feels a wall against her back, and then his mouth is on hers, hungry and desperate. His tongue presses against hers insistently, plunging into her mouth in a way that lights her whole body up like a Christmas tree. She wraps her legs around his slim waist and clings to him tightly, her hand traveling up to the back of his neck and trailing her fingertips through the fine, short hair at the base of his skull. 

She feels goosebumps raise beneath her fingers, and surprisingly, his feathers fluff up, too, the massive wings shivering with pleasure. She breaks away from his lips to laugh in wonder at it.

“What?” he asks defensively, following her gaze to his wing.

“I just can’t believe this is real,” she replies, one hand leaving his head to touch the feathers that are now slowly relaxing back into place. They’re smooth and soft and glossy and entirely real.

“In a bad way?” He watches her face warily.

“No,” she says, stroking his cheek. “Not in a bad way at all.”

He kisses her again, holding her up with one hand while the other begins to wander, touching her face, her breast, the curve of her arm, her ribcage, her belly. Almost as if he’s reassuring himself that she’s all there. She tightens her legs around him, seeking friction to ease the growing ache between her legs, and can feel his growing erection trapped between them. She moans throatily, and another moan answers her. A moan that did not come out of Michael’s mouth.

She and Michael both freeze, staring at each other. And then, as one, they turn to regard Donny Ricci laying on the floor beside them, who emits another pained moan as he begins to stir.

“We probably should do something about him,” Candy remarks.

“Yeah,” Michael sighs, reluctantly lowering her back onto her feet.

“Should I call the cops?” Candy suggests, uncertain. “He was trying to kill me, after all…”

Michael cocks an eyebrow at her skeptically. “You still haven’t learned your lesson about cops yet? All cops are bastards. Trust me on this, I’m the patron saint of law enforcement.”

She barks a laugh at the absurdity of that. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. What are you going to do with him?”

Michael crouches and picks Donny up effortlessly, hefting him over one shoulder. “I’m going to do what I should have done in the first place.”

Candy smiles at him, her arousal, if anything, only heightened by the thought of him bringing his wrath down upon the people who tried to hurt her.

“Well, uh, goodbye,” he says dutifully, and then haltingly and awkwardly leans down to press a kiss to her cheek. “Be back soon.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

He grins at her fondly. Then his wings spread to their full span—the furthest tips brushing both walls of the room—and rise to flap, and somewhere in the middle of their downstroke, he vanishes from sight.

Michael has never had particularly strong feelings about flying, not compared to some of his siblings and certainly not compared to the few humans he’s flown. It’s always been to him little more than a more expedient form of transport, a means of getting from point A to point B. Especially with his old, asymmetrical wings, which left him slower and less maneuverable than almost all of his other siblings. 

But now, he’s not sure if it’s the disappearance of the pain in his shoulder, or the relief of getting them back after living without them, or maybe the uncontainable, brilliant joy rushing through him—but flying on his way to confront Don Carlo and his unbearable offspring, would-be murderer in hand, is the most fun he’s ever had on the wing. He swoops and flips and rolls, rising lazily on the massive desert thermals and then spiraling down into steep, thrilling dives.

Donny Ricci regains consciousness at some point, and his shrieks of terror are an entertaining soundtrack to Michael’s cavorting. Michael tosses him into the air a few times for fun, diving to catch him again a few hundred feet below. He takes a somewhat circuitous route to the Viper Club, circling a few extra times just to have more fun toying with Donny, and finally lands, phasing quickly out of the corporeal realm and then back in so he can come to a landing directly in the center of the main floor.

The venue isn’t open to the public yet, but several of the higher-ups of the organization are lounging at a few of the booths near the stage, drinking espresso, reading magazines, and shooting the shit. It’s almost the exact same scene Michael encountered when he came here after the last time he broke Donny Ricci’s wrist. The main difference is that at the centermost table, flanked by Vincenzo and Junior, sits Don Carlo himself.

A gasp goes up among the group as he lands, and somewhere to his left, there’s the sound of shattering glass as one of the bartenders drops something.

Michael smiles and easily throws Donny onto a table adjacent to the mob leader, which shatters with the impact. “You left some trash at my girlfriend’s house,” he quips. “Thought I’d return it to you.”

Several thugs stand and draw weapons, but some are frozen to the spot in terror, a common reaction to his full angelic appearance. Vincenzo turns as white as a sheet, scrambles to get out of the booth, and takes off towards the back door at a dead sprint.

“Vinny was always the smart one,” Michael observes.

“What the fuck are you?” Don Carlo asks, his eyes wide but his voice admirably steady. Beside him, Junior looks like he might have wet himself.

“I’m the archangel Michael,” he replies. “And you should be afraid.”

Candy rights her living room, setting the couch on its feet again with some effort and picking up the number of items knocked to the floor in the chaos. Then she pads towards the bedroom. Just outside the door, she pauses, stooping to pick up the two pieces of Donny’s handgun that sit on the floor, forgotten. The weapon wasn’t dismantled—it was snapped. Solid steel, broken into pieces as if it were cheap plastic.

She imagines those hands, the enormous inhuman strength of them, and thinks about them on her body just minutes ago. Thinks about them on her breasts, between her legs, inside of her. She shivers in a strange mix of fear and delight and continues into her bedroom.

She sets the pieces of the gun on top of her dresser and picks up her discarded baseball bat from the floor, returning it to its normal place inside her closet. Then she picks up the several items of clothing that fell off their hangers when she burst out of the closet, hanging each one carefully back up. But she pauses when one catches her eye, and an idea begins to form in her mind.

It’s not a single piece of lingerie so much as an entire set—a strappy, delicate mesh and lace bra; panties so insubstantial that they may as well not exist; a garter belt; stockings; and a transparent negligee to top it all off. She’d bought them with the girlfriend before Allie, Denise. They’d bonded over clothes originally, and then their relationship had become focused on taking them off of each other. It was never really meant to last.

Candy thinks about Michael finding her here, spread out on the bed, wearing this little number, and it fills her with glee. She had enjoyed her ability to turn his cool, cynical demeanor into one of gobsmacked, jaw-dropped lust even before she knew he was an angel, but now it makes her feel inordinately powerful.

She strolls into the bathroom and appraises her appearance first, realizing in mild horror that she’d only been half-way through applying her mascara when Donny interrupted her. She’s briefly mortified that she had an entire heartfelt conversation with Michael and made out with him while looking like an extra from A Clockwork Orange. She fixes the wild mess of her hair and finishes putting on her mascara, then selects a very deep, very fuckable shade of red for her lips.

Then she strips and puts on the lingerie, making sure to adjust every snap and strap and ribbon perfectly. She straightens her bedding, and then arranges herself on the pillows, reclining picturesquely in the afternoon light streaming through her windows. She knows it will catch on the pink in her hair and illuminate the lines and contours of her body through the gossamer fabric of her lingerie. Just as soon as he一

“Candy, I’m back!” Michael sing-songs cheerily from the other room. She grins as she listens to his hesitant footsteps moving through the apartment, down the hallway, and一 “Candy?”

He pokes his head into the bedroom, an inquisitive expression on his face that fades as he takes her in, his mouth falling open. He stares at her mutely as he slowly walks towards the end of the bed, eyes raking from her head to her toes and back, over and over again in an endless loop.

His wings are gone—where do they go?—but otherwise, he looks exactly the same as he did when he left, give or take the flush rising up his neck. She had wondered idly if he would come back spattered in their enemies’ blood. Maybe just a little. Maybe with his clothes torn and dirtied from a struggle. Maybe bearing some kind of hard-won trophy to prove his devotion to her. But he’s completely clean, his odd clothes as neat as ever. Oh well.

“Well, are you going to stand there staring, or are you going to come here and make love to me?” she asks, raising an eyebrow coolly.

FWOOSH. 

There they are, she thinks, gasping as his wings burst into view behind him, far too large for her cramped bedroom. For the moment, he doesn’t seem to notice, his eyes hooded with lust and his breath coming heavily. But then he sees the shadow they’re casting over her, blocking the sunlight that had been playing so perfectly on her exposed skin, and he glances at them in annoyance before willing them back away to wherever it is they go. Candy has decided that she’s not going to try to understand the rules that govern the world anymore.

Wings out of the picture, he starts to strip rapidly, tugging off his boots, then starting to work on the hooks that hold his outer mantle closed. Candy sits up and crawls to the end of the bed. He freezes, watching her hungrily.

Once she reaches at the end of the mattress before him, she sits up on her knees, catching his hands with her own. “Let me,” she whispers.

He nods absently and watches as she slowly works the ornate metal hooks free of their eyes and then pushes the coat off his shoulders. Then, she slowly unlatches his belt and slides the leather out of the buckle, inch by inch. Just below her hands, she can see the prominent evidence of his excitement making itself known beneath his tunic. He drags the tunic off over his head himself, and she can’t help but notice that his posture has straightened, and he moves without any apparent discomfort. His skin is entirely unblemished now, aside from a small whorl of shiny, burnt scar tissue in the center of his chest, just above his heart. She runs her hands over his healthy, tanned skin, marveling at it, and pauses with her hand over the scar. 

“What is this?”

“A reminder, I suppose,” he says after a moment’s thought. “Of the choice I made.”

She leans in and presses a kiss to it. When she pulls away, he’s staring down at her, and the enormity of the devotion in his eyes makes her heart leap. He leans down and presses kisses to her eyes, and cheeks, and nose, and chin, and then finally her mouth. It’s a slow, leisurely, drugging kiss that leaves her feeling weak. She clutches at his shoulders, and when they finally part, she sighs, eyes still closed, lingering in the moment.

When she finally opens her eyes, he’s grinning down at her with an expression of infuriating self-satisfaction on his face. Just to get back at him, she reaches down and grips his cock through his trousers, immediately vindicated by the frankly obscene noise he makes.

“Two can play at this game,” he says after taking a moment to compose himself. He lifts her bodily and throws her back onto the bed. She laughs in delight as she bounces a few times, then she’s not laughing anymore, because he’s on top of her in a flash, yanking her negligee open and sucking on her breast through the translucent mesh of her bra.

“Michael,” she gasps, hands flying to grip the back of his head. He braces himself over her on one forearm, fingers nimbly working on the clasps and straps and ribbons she spent so much time getting perfect not very long ago.

“Did you put all this on just for me?” he growls, voice rough. 

“Yes,” she breathes. His fingers hook in the waistband of her panties and drag them down her legs.

“Were you here waiting for me while I was gone?”

“Yes.” His fingers slide against her sex. His eyebrows rise when he realizes how wet she is, mouth parting in a wild grin.

“Were you getting turned on thinking about what I’d do when I saw you?”

“Yes,” she whines. He yanks down his own trousers, getting them to about his knees and then apparently deciding it’s good enough, his hand moving to his lovely, long cock and stroking a few times. Candy’s mouth waters.

“I’ve been waiting to do this again for so long,” he groans, positioning himself on top of her.

“Have you?” she asks innocently.

“You know exactly what you do to me.”

She beams at him and wraps her legs around his waist, urging him forward. For a moment, when he slides home, everything is right with the world.

They move together slowly at first, carefully, savoring it. Candy watches his face change gradually. At first, he holds her gaze, dark eyes brimming with lust and devotion, but then the intensity of it grows too great, and he buries his face in her hair. His hips move faster and faster against hers, his pubic bone hammering against her clit. She arches her back and angles her hips until his cock is pressing just so inside her. She whimpers and clutches him in a death grip that he doesn’t seem to mind, finally trembling into orgasm against him, mouth parting in a cry against his cheek.

Her pleasure seems to be what he was waiting for, because after a last few uneven, desperate thrusts, he spills into her with a strangled sound.

There’s something strangely comforting about his weight pressing down on top of her, and his slowly softening length within her, she thinks dreamily as she basks in the afterglow, absently stroking his sweat-soaked scalp. Something that’s not about the fact that he’s a super powered angel, but rather the fact of his constancy, his reliability, his unique affection for her alone. She feels safe here. Like she could stay in this bed, holding him forever.

“I might—” his voice rumbles softly, hesitantly against her neck. “I might love you.”

“I might love you too,” she replies.

The reports surrounding the so-called Viper Club Incident were national news, for a time. It was unheard of for a single member of the Italian mafia to surrender themselves to the police and confess to their crimes, much less fourteen of them in one evening. 

The mobsters’ stories recounting the incident were also notable for their consistency. Every single one of them claimed that a messenger of God appeared on enormous black wings and showed them terrible visions, visions of death and pain and horror: fears they never even realized they had. The angel told them to repent their evil ways or face those fears and more for an eternity, burning in Hell.

Eyewitness accounts from the waitstaff of the club also, surprisingly, bear this out, although none of them reported experiencing the same visions. Apparently this instance of mass hysteria was confined only to the members of the Ricci crime family. Most of the other witnesses have since dismissed the “angel” as a hoax—likely simply a man wearing a costume. Though several of the staff refused to speak publicly, and their accounts are a subject of much speculation.

When he appeared before the press after his sentencing, the notorious criminal kingpin Don Carlo Ricci had no comment to share about the two consecutive life sentences he would be serving, but he did have a prepared statement. Looking much older than his sixty-five years, he read off of a creased piece of paper in a trembling, nervous voice.

“Before the angel departed, he told me that God had a special message for me, a message I was to deliver to the world. He said if I obeyed his command, I would be granted clemency in the afterlife. The following is the Word of the Lord.” Here, Don Ricci’s voice took on a note of command, as strong as the man himself once was. “LAS VEGAS’S MOST EXCITING NEW ENTERTAINMENT DESTINATION IS NOX! OPENING IN THE SPRING OF 2022, NOX WILL PROVIDE AN IMMERSIVE, ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE, COMBINING FOOD, LODGING, AND STAGE SHOWS THAT BRING YOU BACK TO VEGAS IN ITS HEYDAY. VISIT WWW.NOXCLUB.COM TO LEARN MORE AND BOOK YOUR VISIT TODAY. Amen.”

With that, he folded his paper back up, nodded in stoic satisfaction, and turned to let the police lead him away. He has not spoken to the media since.

The one witness to the incident who bore physical injuries was Donatello Ricci, a low-level Vegas-based button man. Unlike the others, he was struck completely mute and nearly catatonic by the event and has since been admitted to a mental health facility.

The Viper Club Incident has become a favorite of internet sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and Satanists, many of whom have connected it to Lucifer Morningstar, the main financier of Nox and a well-known member of Los Angeles high society. Morningstar’s connection to the Angel of San Bernardino mystery of several years ago (he was volunteering with the LAPD during its investigation), together with the Viper Club Incident, has become much-touted as “proof” that he is, in actuality, the Devil himself. The fact that all eyewitnesses agree that the alleged angel identified himself as “Michael” has been largely dismissed by those groups.

The widespread public interest in the story naturally also aroused extensive curiosity about Nox, so much so that it opened two months ahead of schedule, buoyed by the number of advance reservations made, the extremely generous salaries paid to its builders, and—if local gossip to to be believed—the absolutely merciless attention to detail of the couple overseeing the business. The man, whose name is incidentally also Michael, was known to be a particular pain in the ass.

However, the public’s interest quickly moved on from the Viper Club Incident, focusing on the latest atrocity, or super-virus, or music video featuring a particularly provocative dance move. Humanity tends to forget about miracles, bound as they are to the world and its many cares, worries, and distractions.

Miracles like God reconciling with the Devil. A child being born to an angel and a human. Brother forgiving brother after eons of bad blood. A good woman falling in love with a bastard as legendary as the archangel Michael, and him falling in love with her in turn.

They happen every day.

Chapter Text

Michael wakes slowly to the sensation of fingers working into the sensitive muscles at the base of his wings, fingernails scraping gently at the skin beneath his feathers. He sighs into his pillow in pleasure, half-awake, dreams of pink hair and curving, supple, peach-soft skin still fading from his mind. Then the fingers touching him shift slightly and hit that spot, and he makes a noise that he’d be embarrassed by if he were more fully awake, his hips driving forward helplessly against the mattress. He cracks one eye open and he’s greeted by the sight of Candy’s face, lit up with mischief and the morning light, watching him from the pillow beside his. One of her arms lies innocently across his back.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he mumbles into his pillow.

“You weren’t waking up, and it’s basically impossible to get out from under one of these myself.” She gestures to his wing, which is lying across her body like a feathered blanket.

“It’s too early,” he grumbles, closing his eyes again and pulling her body closer to his with the offending wing.

“Michael, come on,” she laughs. “Big day today! Aren’t you excited?”

“I’ll be more excited after an appropriate amount of beauty sleep,” he replies, although he feels a smile creeping across his face. Her enthusiasm is contagious and always difficult for him to resist. But now it strikes him that it might be more entertaining to make her work for it before he lets her out of bed.

“Come on,” she pouts, kicking at his legs and gripping the arch of his wing. “I need to get up and get ready.”

He grins, resisting slightly as she tries to push the wing off of her. After a few more moments of struggle, she finally gives up and flops back onto the mattress. “Okay, what if we shower together?”

“We’ve moved on to negotiation, hm? You have my attention.”

She traces one finger in innocent, meandering patterns on his bicep. “And maybe in the shower, I could go down on you?”

He frowns contemplatively and tilts his head, considering.

“Or maybe...you could go down on me?”

He grins and folds his wings back into the ether. “Now you’re talking my language.”

It feels like all of Las Vegas thrums with excitement on the evening of the much-anticipated opening Nox. The hotel is fully booked, boasting guests ranging from curious locals to Hollywood movie stars and foreign billionaires, and the line of patrons outside eager for a chance to experience dinner and a show at what has been jokingly referred to in the press as “God’s Own Nightclub” wraps around the block three times.

Standing at the entrance to greet their guests are Candy Fletcher—radiant in a vintage Charles James butterfly gown, its satin shimmering in the club’s low, tasteful light, and its bustle of mauve tulle flaring out elegantly behind the tight-fitting bodice every time she moves—and Lucifer Morningstar, king of the Los Angeles nightlife scene, whose broad white smile shines as brightly as his immaculate white tuxedo.

Behind the two social butterflies, smiling politely at their guests but uninterested in glad-handing, stand their partners, no less beautiful or elegantly-clad, but never quite as suited to the limelight. Lucifer’s twin is dressed accordingly in all black, and leans casually against the wall in a shadowed alcove near the door, his eyes fixed on Candy. Chloe Decker stands less casually a careful few yards away. She wears an elegant and modest black silk gown with a high neckline and breathtakingly low back that skims her slim form like a lover’s hands. Even the untrained eye could discern that it easily costs more than a luxury car. She grips her clutch with silk-gloved hands and glances at Michael out of the corner of her eye every so often with barely-concealed distaste.

When the doors finally close in the faces of the disappointed remaining would-be club goers waiting outside—the management takes fire code very seriously—Candy turns to Michael, her face alight with excitement.

“Well, time for me to head back and get ready!” she says, bouncing a little.

“Knock ‘em dead,” he says fondly.

“Gimme a kiss for good luck?”

His eyes dart self-consciously to Chloe, who watches the exchange with a hawklike stare, but he leans down nonetheless, pressing a soft, open-mouthed kiss to her lips, one hand gripping the small of her back.

Candy sighs as they part, stroking his lapel. “Okay, see you after!” With that, she turns in a swirl of tulle and hurries away towards the stage.

Michael’s eyes flit again to Chloe, who’s still staring at him, and then away, searching desperately for his brother, hoping he’ll come to whisk away his terrifying girlfriend. But Lucifer is distracted chatting with some acquaintance near the bar and seems uninterested in rescuing him from this particular reckoning.

“You’re actually in love with her, huh?” Chloe states flatly, clearly skeptical. The former detective still talks to Candy frequently on the phone, and Michael can’t help but notice that those conversations often leave Candy a bit withdrawn and distant. He knows that he deserves it, and the fear that Chloe might one day convince Candy to leave him is a constant companion.

“Yes,” he says honestly, uncomfortable having to admit it in this context.

“You know how lucky you are that she’s willing to stoop to be with someone like you?”

“I am fully aware,” he mutters.

Chloe pushes away from the wall and strides elegantly toward him. He straightens anxiously. 

When she draws near to him, she murmurs, “If you hurt her, I will convince Lucifer to unwrite you from existence. Am I clear?”

“Crystal,” he replies, swallowing nervously.

She nods shortly and glides past him, walking over to join God at the bar. She raises one elegant hand, and Natalie and her team of bartenders leap at the chance to take her order.

Michael busies himself with directing the waitstaff and addressing logistical concerns as the club goes through the anticipated opening night bumps in the road. There aren’t quite enough tables for all the people they let in, so he spends a good fifteen minutes bullying couples sitting alone at four-tops into sharing their tables with strangers, something that the well-heeled clientele seem to think is beneath them. It doesn’t take much more than a glance from him to make them agree to it, however.

Once all the problems are more or less sorted out, Michael takes a seat at the far end of the bar, at a stool with a clear view of the stage, as the house lights finally dim.

Lucifer steps out onto the stage, fairly glittering in the spotlight, a vintage microphone in hand.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! My name is Lucifer Morningstar, and I’d like to personally thank you for joining us tonight at the grand opening of Nox!” The audience cheers uproariously. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this nightclub and hotel would not be here today without the vision, drive, and tireless work of one Candy Fletcher,” Lucifer says, before adding, “...and boyfriend.”

Michael glares at him, and Lucifer winks.

“In order to get where they are today, they quite literally went through a trial by fire, and came out the other side, so give them a round of applause!”

Somehow, a spotlight finds him, and Michael scowls into the glare as the audience claps politely. On the stage, Lucifer grins and gives him a brief golf clap. Then with a gesture, the spotlight on Michael blinks off and all the lights aside from the one on Lucifer go dark.

“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. I’m pleased to present your main act for the night, the lovely, the talented, the alluring...Candy Fletcher!”

Michael’s heart clenches with an emotion he’s not sure he can identify as Lucifer bows with a flourish and backs off the stage, and the curtain parts to reveal Candy, shimmering and radiant beneath the spotlight. After a moment, he realizes it’s pride. Pride for her and her dogged determination to make her dream a reality. Pride that he was able to help her do it. Pride that they both made it to this point. The feeling swells like a balloon inside of him, and he can’t resist the smile that it brings to his face.

Candy appraises the audience, expression sultry and commanding, and then the second curtain behind her slowly slides open, horns beginning to play a seductive, bluesy melody as the full big band is revealed, immaculate in their matching blood-red tuxedos. Candy raises the microphone to her mouth and begins to sing,

It's gonna rain any minute
There's not a star in sight,
Things are mighty slow
I guess I'll close up shop
And go home to Joe

I know he won't be glad to see me
Without a penny to the good
But I'm not caring much what happens
I did the best I could
He's just good-for-nothing Joe

But, oh, I love him so
Guess I’d die if good for nothin’ Joe
Ever try to leave me flat
Oh yes, I’m certain of that

Candy’s eyes find his, somehow, through the gloom, seeking him out just like she did all those months ago. She steps off the stage and wanders through the audience, weaving between the tables that she already knows like the back of her hand, holding court here in her domain like a queen, or maybe a sorceress. The audience watches her, spellbound, but she only has eyes for him.

She sidles up to him, a challenge in her eyes, tracing a gloved hand down his chest as she sings:

Folks I know can't understand
Why I must have that man
Lord, he sends me like nobody can
Ain't a woman just like that?

At the end of the verse, she tilts his head towards hers by the chin and presses a lingering kiss to his lips. The audience hoots and whistles, but Michael can’t be bothered to care. She beams at him when she finally pulls away, and he watches her, entranced, as she makes her way back to the stage for the end of the song.

After all these months, he still sometimes has a difficult time believing that she really wants to be with him, but every day she convinces him anew. It’s more than he deserves, but he’ll take it, eagerly, with both hands. 

And anyone who has a problem with it can go fuck themselves.

Lucifer slides into the booth reserved for him and his lovely consort with a sigh. Having finished introducing Candy, his official duties for the night are over, which means he gets to spend the rest of it enjoying the show with Chloe. Maybe, if he’s lucky, she’ll agree to christen the restroom with him. That is, assuming Michael and Candy haven’t already gone at it back there. His face wrinkles in distaste at the thought.

“I don’t get it,” Chloe says, shaking her head and jabbing at the maraschino cherry bobbing in her Old Fashioned with her straw. Lucifer follows her gaze to find her looking at Michael and Candy across the room. Candy is working the floor as she sings and stops at the bar to kiss Michael. When the two break apart, Michael stares at her with what might as well be literal hearts in his eyes.

“The heart is a mysterious thing,” Lucifer agrees.

“In what universe does he deserve a woman like that?” 

Lucifer pauses, thinking carefully. “At least a few of them, curiously enough,” he replies.

Chloe scoffs and takes a drink.

“It’s a real shame, actually,” Lucifer continues. “Him choosing to live on Earth has made work much more annoying. The cherubim he’s been training to replace him are keen, but not very bright. Bloody Zoomers.” He lifts a glass of scotch that had previously been nowhere to be seen on the table before them to his lips.

Chloe sighs and links her arm with his, twining their fingers together and leaning to rest against his shoulder. Lucifer turns to press a kiss to the crown of her head. 

“I guess all’s well that ends well, though,” she says.

“I’d hardly call this an ending,” Lucifer muses. “Seems much more like a beginning.”

Chloe groans. “Then I’m gonna need another drink.”